Serial probe recognition performance by a rhesus monkey and a human with 10- and 20-item lists

Abstract

A rhesus monkey performed at high accuracy in a serial probe recognition task with color pictures as stimuli. The monkey's serial position curve was similar in form to a human's and demonstrated the theoretically important primacy and recency effects with lists containing as many as 10 or 20 items. The high accuracy of the monkey was shown to be largely due to the minimization of proactive interference through the use of more than 200 distinct items. These results encourage the view of similar mechanisms of memory in monkey and humans.