Short-Term Forgetting of Order Under Conditions of Reduced Interference James S. Nairne, Howard L. Whiteman, and Matthew R. Kelley Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A. T hree experiments examined the short-term retention of order in a modi®ed Brown±Peterson task. Our intent was to examine the loss of order memory, unconfounded by item memory, under conditions in which interference from prior trials is kept low. In previous work on the short-term forgetting of order, experimenters have tended to repeat the same items across trials or to draw from a restricted set; in our experiments, we changed the to-be-recalled items from trial to trial and used reconstruction as the retention measure. In all three experiments, very little forgetting was obtained across retention intervals that have traditionally produced dramatic and systematic loss. Our results are reminiscent of those obtained in the Brown± Peterson task when performance is assessed after only the ®rst experimental trial. In the typical Brown±Peterson experiment (Brown, 1958; Peterson & Peterson, 1959), subjects are presented with a short list of items (e.g. three words or a consonant trigram), followed by a distractor-®lled retention interval of varying duration. At the point of recall, the task is to remember the list items in their correct serial order. Under these conditions, forgetting is often dramatic. In one condition, for example, Peterson and Peterson (1959) found that subjects responded correctly over 70% of the time following 3 sec of distrac- tion. After 18 sec, the percentage of correct responses had dropped to 15%. One advantage of requiring serial recall is that separate estimates of forgetting can be obtained for recall based on an ordered or free-scoring criterion. Direct comparisons of these measures reveal that ordered recall shows much more forgetting than does free recall, in which items are scored without regard to original serial position (e.g. Marsh, Sebrechts, Hicks, & Landau, 1997; Muter, 1980; Sebrechts, Marsh, & Seamon, 1989). Muter (1980) found, for example, little difference between ordered and unordered scoring on immediate tests, but there were advantages for unordered scoring of 20±30% at retention intervals of 2, 4, and 8 sec. One might interpret these results as suggesting that order information is lost rapidlyfrom memory,but serialrecallhasthedisadvantageofconfoundingmemoryfor order with memory for the items themselves. A scoring criterion based on ordered recall therefore measures not only the loss of order information, but the loss of item information as well. A more accurate assessment of the rate at which order information is lost comes from experiments using order reconstruction as the retention measure. In reconstruction tasks, THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1999, 52A (1), 241±251 Requests for reprints and correspondence should be sent to James S. Nairne, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907±1364, U.S.A. Email: nairne@psych.purdue.edu q 1999 The Experimental Psychology Society