The present study was designed to investigate the manner in and the extent to which a subject's experience with the position of items influences the strength of interitem associations as they are measured by intralist intrusions, by the association method, and by transfer effects on paired-associate performance. (Author/RK)

Results indicate that when subjects are given explicit instructions as to the interlist relationship and when the transfer list is presented at a relatively slow rate, both positive and negative transfer effects may be obtained in the serial/paired-associate paradigm. (Author)

An associative model of serial learning is described based on the assumption that the effective stimulus for a serial-list item is generated by adaptation-level coding of the item's ordinal position. How the model can generate predictions of aspects of serial-learning data is illustrated. (SLD)