RECAPP-XPR: A smartphone application for presenting and recalling experimentally controlled stimuli over longer timescales

We report two experiments that used smartphone applications for presenting and recalling verbal stimuli over extended timescales. In Experiment 1, we used an iPhone application that we had developed, called RECAPP-XPR, to present 76 participants with a single list of eight words presented at a rate of one word every hour, followed by a test of free recall an hour later. The experiment was exceptionally easy to schedule, taking only between 5 and 10 min to set up using a web-based interface. RECAPP-XPR randomly samples the stimuli, presents the stimuli, and collects the free recall data. The stimuli disappear shortly after they have been presented, and RECAPP-XPR collects data on when each stimulus was viewed. In Experiment 2, the study was replicated using the widely used image-sharing application Snapchat. A total of 197 participants were tested by 38 student experimenters, who manually presented the stimuli as “snaps” of experimentally controlled stimuli using the same experimental rates that had been used in Experiment 1. Like all snaps, these stimuli disappeared from view after a very short interval. In both experiments, we observed significant recall advantages for the first and last list items (primacy and recency effects, respectively), and there were clear tendencies to make more transitions at output between near-neighboring items, with a forward-ordered bias, consistent with temporal contiguity effects. The respective advantages and disadvantages of RECAPP-XPR and Snapchat as experimental software packages are discussed, as is the relationship between single-study-list smartphone experiments and long-term recency studies of real-world events.