The confusion of order in short-term memory

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Abstract
Brown's (1965) A measure was used to determine the information preserved in types of errors committed in a short‐term memory task, and the distributions of different errors over serial positions in the messages were observed. It was found that errors concerned with the ordering of items in a message preserved more information about the original stimulus than did errors concerned with the selection of the items themselves. Although the serial position curve for all errors combined was bow‐shaped and negatively skewed, as has been most commonly reported in the literature, curves for different types of errors differed markedly in their shapes. While these results are not easily explained by a theory which attributes the serial position effect solely to the effects of recency and rehearsal, they are compatible with the view that some serial positions are more discriminable than others.

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