Response latencies in discriminations of recency

Subjects were asked to report which of two test words had been presented more recently in a list of 4 or 10 words. In each of four experiments, the study position of the probe that had been presented earlier in the list had little or no effect on response latency, whereas the study position of the probe that had been presented later in the list had a large and reliable effect on response latency. In Experiment 4, some test items were lures, and they had no effect on response latency. These results are incompatible with several theories of recency discrimination and strongly suggest parallel self-terminating processing of the probes.