Classic free recall memory effects using video stimuli

Several effects have been discovered to explain memory for lists of words. However, demonstrations of these effects are scant for other common types of stimuli like short videos. Here, we had participants encode and recall lists of TikTok videos that were presented either in categorical groups or mixed. We found that several classic memory effects were preserved, including proactive interference across lists and primacy and recency effects within lists. Furthermore, after computing semantic similarity on video descriptions, we found that successively recalled videos were more semantically related only within the categorised group (semantic contiguity). Conversely, although both groups clustered recall to nearby items from encoding (temporal contiguity), this was stronger in the mixed group. These findings replicate and extend prior research on word lists to video stimuli, allowing generalisations of prior findings to this increasingly common form of communication.