Abstract
The classical literature argued that when attention-getting items are placed in the middle of a to-be-learned list of items, the enhanced performance on the isolate is obtained at the expense of the other list items. Three experiments are presented which are not consistent with this tradeoff formulation and argue rather for an improvement in overall list performance. It is argued that this effect: (a) seems related to serial memory tasks wherein a repetition strategy is employed, (b) requires that the isolated item be centrally located in the list, and (c) is facilitated by a simultaneous presentation of list items.
