Historical Lessons in the Science of Psychology
Short-Term Memory at the Turn of the Century
Mary Whiton Calkins's Memory Research
Stephen Madigan and Ruth O'Hara
University of Southern California
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) is often mentioned in
accounts of the history of memory research as the inventor
of the method of paired associates as well as for her investigations of primacy, recency, frequency, and vividness
in association formation. Her experimental studies over
the period from 1892 to 1894 not only introduced the
paired associates method but were also pioneering investigations of immediate memory that led Calkins to identify
modality effects, primacy and recency effects, and a number of other phenomena rediscovered many years later.
Calkins's work deserves more recognition in historical accounts of the early years of experimental psychology and
memory research.
The purpose of this article is to draw attention to some
interesting and largely unknown aspects of Mary Whiton
Calkins's (1863-1930) work on association and memory.
Accounts of the early years of experimental psychology
commonly refer to her studies of primacy, recency, frequency, and vividness as well as to her introduction of
the paired associates method (Cofer, 1979; Newman,
1987; Postman, 1985). Calkins's articles describing this
research in fact contained much more than reports of the
effects of the four factors affecting associability. A detailed
examination of her experimental procedures and data
reveals that she reported many experimental effects that
were rediscovered and recognized as fundamental much
later. Among her findings, using modern names for them,
were modality effects in immediate recall; recency effects
and the influence of interpolated events on recency effects;
intraserial repetition; negative recency effects; output interference; and unlearning effects.
Readers may be familiar with Calkins as the first
woman to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1905; also, she has been included in recent accounts of the careers of women in
psychology. Biographical information about Calkins can
be found in her own statement (Calkins, 1930) and in
Furumoto (1979) and Scarborough and Furumoto (1987).
In this article we will focus on the purpose, methodology,
and results of her research. The biographical details are
drawn mostly from Scarborough and Furumoto's account
170
of Calkins's status and studies at Harvard over the period
from 1890 to 1894.
The Research Setting
Calkins, with a Smith College undergraduate degree, was
hired by Wellesley College in 1887 as an instructor of
Greek. She was encouraged by the college to obtain advanced training in psychology with a view to assuming a
newly created position in that subject. Despite policies
that excluded women from graduate programs, Calkins
was finally able to join William James's graduate seminar
in the fall of 1890, pursuing at the same time training in
laboratory practices with Edmund Sanfbrd at Clark University in 1891—1892. However, this graduate training was
not undertaken as an officially admitted graduate student,
nor was her work and study with Hugo Miinsterburg in
1892-1894, which formed the basis of her research and
publications on association and memory.
Calkins's research initially appeared in the first volume of Psychological Review in the form of a brief report
describing a research program "undertaken as an attempt
to answer experimentally the question of the relative significance of frequency, vividness, recency, and earliness
as conditions of association" (Calkins, 1894, p. 476). This
was followed by a second brief report (Calkins, 1896a)
and then by a more detailed theoretical and experimental
treatment (Calkins, 1896b). The purpose of the experimental studies was to "supplement the purely introspective study of the nature of association by describing in
relatively concrete terms the probable direction of trains
of associated images" (Calkins, 1896b, p. 35). The first
34 pages of this article dealt with the causes and course
of association, with special emphasis on the distinction
between the objects of consciousness and the contents of
consciousness. These two terms correspond fairly closely
to cue and to-be-remembered item in current memory
research terminology. In Calkins's usage, an object of
consciousness was a percept; the contents of consciousness
were the stored associations evoked by the object. AICorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Stephen
Madigan, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061.
February 1992 • American Psychologist
Copyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/92/S2.00
Vol.47, No. 2, 170-174
though the specifics of the association theory to which
she devoted considerable space have little contemporary
interest, the objects-contents distinction does because it
appears to be directly responsible for the basic experimental tool she devised—the method of paired associates.
The Paired Associates Method
We say "appears to be directly responsible" because one
of the curious aspects of Calkins's 1894 and 1896 articles
is that there was in them not one word of rationalization
of the method. For Calkins it may have been a simple
and direct way of realizing the objects-contents in a fashion that could not be done with serial learning methods.
We should note here too that although Calkins was apparently thefirstsystematically to use and report a paired
associates methodology, she did not use the term paired
associates. In fact she used no name at all for the procedure in her experimental reports. The attribution of
the term method of right associates to Calkins (Stevens
& Gardner, 1982, p. 83) is incorrect; Calkins used that
term only in her autobiographical statement some 30
years later (Calkins, 1930). The earliest use of the term
paired associate that we have been able tofindin English
is by Thoradike (1908), who did not cite Calkins's studies
or methods.
The Experiments
Calkins's 1894 and 1896 articles reported the results of
several independent experiments with about 60 subjects
and 2,200 study-test trials in all. The basic procedure
was to present lists of from 7 to 12 paired associate items,
the cue items being color names or three-letter nonsense
syllables and the response items being two- or three-digit
numbers. Auditory and visual presentation were used in
different studies. Calkins's procedure was essentially a
single-trial paired associates procedure, identical in all
important respects to the methods described by Murdock
(1974) and others. Rather than using a probe technique
to test a single pair per list, Calkins typically tested every
item presented, usually with an immediate test but sometimes with a "filled interlude" between presentation and
testing.
With this basic research tool Calkins set out to study
the influence of four characteristics of an object of consciousness that might influence the readiness with which
the object called some specific contents to mind. These
were primacy, recency, frequency, and vividness. Her
methodology involved within-list or within-sequence
contrasts. For example, to study the effects of frequency,
Calkins constructed lists in which a pair, such as WEZ31, might occur two or three times, whereas another pair,
such as WEZ-47, might occur once, all in the same list.
Similarly, to study recency, Calkins used sequences in
which pairs such as WEZ-39 and WEZ-31 occurred in
the same list, one in the last or second-to-the last serial
position, and one earlier. Calkins used an additional procedure that extended the obvious parallel with the retroactive interference (AB-AC) paradigm: She required
subjects to attempt recall of both of the response items
February 1992 • American Psychologist
in any order to the stimulus or cue item, a procedure
later called the modified modified free recall (MMFR)
test (Barnes & Underwood, 1954).
Table 1 shows an example of one of Calkins's lists,
consisting of color-number pairs and designed to study
frequency effects. In her experiments subjects were tested
with several such sequences, each differing in the variable
studied. For example, some sequences had vivid as opposed to ordinary pairings, some sequences had more
and less recent pairings, and so on.
The Results
Calkins's main finding concerning the influence of primacy, recency, frequency, and vividness was that frequency was by far the strongest influence: In general, a
repeated pairing overrode the influence of a vivid one or
a recent one. The effect was strong enough to suggest to
her a mental hygiene application: "The prominence of
frequency is of course of grave importance, for it means
the possibility of exercising some control over the life of
the imagination, and of definitely combatting harmful or
troublesome associations" (1896b, p. 56). Calkins's findings concerning other contrasts, such as primacy versus
vividness, led to no such clear-cut conclusions. However,
in discussing her data Calkins made a number of interesting observations of effects that were peripheral to the
primacy-recency-frequency-vividness issue but of considerable interest to contemporary memory theory. The
following are among the more noteworthy observations
made by Calkins.
Recency Effects
Calkins explicitly recognized the nature of the short-term
recency effect in several ways. One was to arrange test
sequences so that the last pair in a list was never tested
first, her rationale being a sensory-memory consideration:
"The recent color . . . was placed second, not first, in
Table 1
Example of Calkins's (1896)Experimental Materials:
Paired Associate List to Test Frequency Effects
Study series
Serial
position
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Test series
Color
Number
Color
Green
Brown
Violet
Light grey
Violet
Orange
Blue
Violet
Medium grey
Violet
Light green
Strawberry
47
73
26
58
61
84
12
61
39
61
78
52
Blue
Light grey
Strawberry
Green
Violet
Orange
Brown
Medium grey
Light green
171
the test series so that no after-image of the numeral might
remain" (1896b, p. 44). Calkins also clearly identified the
effects of interpolated events (test trials in this case) on
recency effects: "The swiftly decreasing influence of recency . . . is thus clearly indicated: even the intervention
of only two colors between the last combination of color
and numeral was sufficient to annihilate the effect of recency" (p. 45). Interestingly, Calkins did not refer to
James's concept of primary memory in this connection
even though her description of recency effects seems very
close to this concept.
Figure 1
Serial Position Effects and the Negative Recency
Effect in Immediate (I) and Delayed (D) Recall
100
Calkms (1898)
o I
80--
o—o
o
Modality Effects
The second of Calkins's two sets of experiments involved
auditory rather than visual presentation, with pairs of
nonsense syllables and numbers. Her comparisons of results with the visual series in the first experiment led her
to observe that "the records of the recency experiments
show the very striking effect of auditory recency" (1896b,
p. 50). Just as later research showed the restriction of
modality effects to an auditory superiority for recent items
(Murdock, 1974), so Calkins found that visual and auditory series seemed essentially similar except for the influence of recency. Calkins (1986b) also attributed the
modality effect to a storage rather than a retrieval process:
"The suggestiveness, not the reproduction, seems to be
increased in the auditory series" (p. 51).
Negative Recency Effect
When a recall test is delayed by a filled interval (test events,
rehearsal-preventing activity), recall of terminal items in
a sequence tends to fall below that of earlier items i n t t e
sequence. This is especially true when a list is recalled
immediately and then again some time later. In this case
the effect of serial position is reversed: The last item in a
list, typically recalled most frequently in an immediate
test, is now least frequently recalled in the second, delayed
test.
This negative effect of recency (Craik, 1970) was
described by Calkins in two ways. In her paired associate
studies she compared the recall of pairs of a given kind
that had been presented at different serial positions. She
found that the last pair in a list was recalled less frequently
than pairs from more remote serial positions when not
tested immediately. She also advanced what would now
be called an encoding or learning deficit interpretation of
the effect: "This decrease is evidently the result of fatigue;
the twelfth pair is not observed with the same attention
as the earlier ones" (1894, p. 482). This, in fact, became
a common interpretation of the effect much later (McCabe
& Madigan, 1973).
The occurrence of the negative recency effect in the
serial position effects of an immediate and a delayed recall
was also reported by Calkins in her replication of Kirkpatrick's (1894) study of free recall of objects and auditorially and visually presented object names (Calkins,
1898). Figure 1 shows Calkins's serial position data for
immediate (I) and delayed (D) recall of a list of 10 auditorially presented words. The main point of these data
172
CD
J-,
-t->
a 40-CD
•—•
O
S-,
CD
20--
D
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Serial position
10
Note. Data are from "Short Studies in Memory and in Association From the
Wellesley College Psychological Laboratory: I. A Study of Immediate and of
Delayed Recall of the Concrete and of the Verbal" by M. W. Calkins, 1898,
Psychological Review, 5, p. 453.
for Calkins was that "in delayed recall of auditory words
[the last item of a list] is even one of those least well
remembered" (p. 456). The comparison of these results
with an unwitting replication performed some 75 years
later is interesting (Madigan, McCabe, & Itatani, 1972,
Experiment 2). Figure 2 shows immediate serial recall
and delayed free recall of lists of auditorially presented
words from that study. Calkins's serial position effects are
noisy (items were confounded with serial positions, and
subjects were tested with only one list), but for all of the
differences in design and procedure in the two experiments they both show the reversal of the effect of serial
position in immediate and delayed tests.
Primacy Effects
Calkins (1986b) also noted important characteristics of
primacy effects in immediate recall. These included the
observation of "the ineffectiveness of primacy in the long
series" (p. 46) and a cumulative rehearsal hypothesis
about the origin of the effect: The subject "may not only
accentuate the first presentation but recur to it while
learning the rest of the series" (p. 46), a conclusion also
reached by Glanzer (1972). Calkins may also have been
the first to use the term primacy in connection with list
recall experiments.
February 1992 • American Psychologist
Contingency Effects in Recall
Figure 2
Serial Position Effects and the Negative Recency
Effect in Immediate (I) and Delayed (D) Recall
100
Madigan et al. (1972) p I
Although Calkins dealt with joint recall effects only
briefly, her very thorough reporting of data allows readers
to reconstruct 2 X 2 tables to examine contingency effects
in recall. For example, given recall of the frequent pair,
what was the probability of recall of a pairing presented
once? Table 2 indicates a positive dependency in recall:
Probability of recall of normal pairings was .220 (44/
200) whereas probability of recall of normal pairings given
recall of the frequent pairing was .308 (37/120). A similar
analysis of vividness effects also indicates positive dependency in recall. The theoretical significance of analyses
such as these was to be debated many years later (Hintzman, 1972).
Afterwards
2
3 4 5 6 7
Serial position
Note. Data are from "Immediate and Delayed Recall of Words and Pictures"
by S. A. Madigan, L. McCabe, and S. Itatani, 1972, Canadian Journal of Psychology, 26, p. 411. Copyright 1972 by the Canadian Psychological AssociationAdapted by permission.
Unlearning Effects
As already noted, Calkins (1896b) used lists in which the
same cue or stimulus item was paired with different response items. She described an effect obtained with such
materials as "the negative result of habit, since the effect
of habitual combination with a given stimulus is seen to
be a small decrease in the likelihood of ordinary connection with the same stimulus" (p. 40). Table 2 illustrates
the kind of data Calkins was considering. These data come
from 200 test sequences in the visual presentation experiments, using lists in which there was a frequent pairing
(e.g., violet-61 presented three times) and an "ordinary"
pairing (e.g., violet-26 presented once). These data show
an intraserial repetition effect, with items presented three
times recalled with probability .60 (120/200). They also
show an unlearning effect, with the ordinary pairing recalled with probability .22 (44/200). In this experiment
the probability of recall of "normal" pairings (cue and
response terms occurring once only, e.g., orange-84 in
Table 1) was .26; the difference between this and the recall
of ordinary pairings was what Calkins referred to as the
negative result of habit. There are important differences
between Calkins's procedures and the list-learning procedures usually used to study retroactive interference, but
she was clearly describing interference effects in a way
not very different from the unlearning account of retroactive interference (Barnes & Underwood, 1954).
February 1992 • American Psychologist
Calkins's theoretical and experimental efforts were met
by an immediate disappointment. In 1895 she took the
equivalent of a doctoral examination at Harvard University; the award of the doctoral degree was very enthusiastically recommended by James, Josiah Royce, and
Miinsterburg, to no avail. Receipt of the recommendation
was acknowledged but not acted on by Harvard. Calkins
returned to Wellesley in 1895 as an associate professor
and was appointed professor there in 1898, "the matter
of her degree remaining unresolved" (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987, p. 46). In 1902 she declined the offer of a
doctorate from Radcliffe College. Twenty-five years later
the issue was resolved, in a way: A petition to the university from Harvard degree holders to award Calkins the
PhD was rejected.
Calkins published no further along the lines of her
1894-1896 research, and her last publication on memory
(Calkins, 1898) appears to have been the replication of
Kirkpatrick's (1894) study. Her subsequent theoretical
interests revolved around introspection and the concept
oftheself(Hilgard, 1987).
As Stevens and Gardner (1982) noted, Calkins was
not mentioned by Boring (1929) in connection with the
paired associate method and her name did not occur in
the first comprehensive review of human learning
(McGeoch, 1942). Her discoveries reviewed in this article
appear to be essentially unknown and unacknowledged.
Calkins's research is not entirely alone in this respect. A
notable case is Daniels's (1893) research testing retention
Table 2
Calkins's (1896) Unlearning and Dependency Effects
in Recall with Frequent Pairings
Ordinary pairing
Frequent
pairing
Recalled
Not recalled
Total
Recalled
Not recalled
Total
37
7
44
83
73
156
120
80
200
173
of a minimal amount of material over intervals up to 20
seconds with a distracting task—a procedure now known
as the Brown-Peterson paradigm (Brown, 1958; Peterson
& Peterson, 1959). Daniels's research has been cited only
infrequently and sometimes misdated (Blumenthal, 1977;
Murdock, 1987; Newman, 1987), and like Calkins' findings it did nothing to establish a continuing interest in
phenomena of immediate memory. Accordingly, Calkins's
and Daniels's research seem to fit Sarup's (1978) category
of historical anticipations: "those antecedent ideas that
have a likeness to, but not developmental ties with, later
modes of thought" (p. 478).
Calkins's and Daniels's studies are good examples
of Newman's (1987) point that a wide variety of experimental methods were in use in memory research around
the turn of the century; serial learning in the Ebbinghaus
tradition was by no means the only procedure used.
However, the study of multitrial learning and transfer that
prevailed approximately between 1920 and 1960 proceeded without much attention to phenomena of immediate memory. More than 50 years would pass before
they became the focus of intense experimental and theoretical efforts, and this perhaps explains the contemporary
lack of awareness of earlier work such as Calkins's and
Daniels's. It should also be said that Calkins herself
downplayed the memory implications of her research:
Her interest was in associative processes, and not in the
use of the paired-associates procedure as a test of "mere
memory" (1894, p. 479). She cited very little memory
research of any kind in her 1894-1896 articles.
Nonetheless, it should be clear from the examples
of Calkins's methods, results, and writings that her work
represents something more than old data that can be
evaluated or reinterpreted in contemporary terms, and
more than mere intimations of present-day theoretical
concepts in earlier writings. Calkins explicitly recognized
and vividly described several basic phenomena of immediate memory. A graph of serial position curves showing the effects of distracting activities on the recency effect
has become almost as common in introductory texts as
a graph of Ebbinghaus's curve of forgetting, and it seems
appropriate that her discovery of this effect, among several
others, be recognized as such. To quote one of the reviewers of this article, her writings on association and
memory "constitute a truly remarkable legacy, as they
represent important, basic, replicable phenomena that
are fundamentally important to our current conceptualization of human memory."
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