ABSTRACT
Today, we shall try to weave together a pair of themes for which Bennet Murdock made early and seminal contributions. First, Murdock was among a small handful of modern pioneers in experimentation on short-term memory (Murdock, 1961). We hope to show that these discoveries were important for the light they shed on how human memory works, in general, not for uncovering a new “system” of memory. Our argument is based on a microscope metaphor—matter looks quite different under the microscope than it does to the naked eye, but it is the same matter, just seen in better detail.
Secondly, we discuss new experiments on position effects in recall that we think are faithful to Murdochs Serial Position Distinctiveness Hypothesis for primacy and recency effects (Murdock, 1960). In contrast to the conventional wisdom of the day which then, as now, was highly convoluted (this is the only use we shall make of the term convolution) and controversial, he proposed a simple perceptual attitude: Performance is relatively better at the endpoints of any series than in the interior of the series because those end positions are the most distinctive in the series.
