The next-in-line effect and the recall of structured and unstructured material

Brenner (1973) has reported a ‘next-in-line’ effect in which people, who have to perform in turn before an audience and then have to recall what they themselves and others produced, show a significant decrement in recall for material presented immediately before and after their own presentation, compared with the recall of the same material by people who merely listened without any threat of performing. An experiment is reported which examines in such a situation the effect upon recall of variation in the structure of material. Subjects who had to recall words which had been read out and which were strongly associated showed little difference in amount of recall whether they had themselves read out the words or had merely listened. Where the words were more loosely related, however, readers showed a significant decrement compared with listeners, especially for words which had been read out prior to their own performance. The results have implications for the role of performance in front of others in the encoding and retrieval of material for recall.