ABSTRACT
Immediate, serial verbal recall could be viewed as one of the simplest tasks used by investigators of cognition and intelligence. On every trial, a list of items is presented to the subject, who is supposed to reproduce that list verbatim. The correct response is the same as the stimulus. What could be simpler? It would be tempting to try to account for performance in the task in an equally simple manner. How would that account go? Perhaps we have an internal recording of the sensory impression of the list items, along with a verbal output process that can convert the sensory impression back into spoken or written words; or perhaps each sensory impression is immediately converted into a motor plan and the motor plans are retained in a memory store, in order, until the list ends and the response can begin.
