Rethinking the Ranschburg effect

The inhibitory Ranschburg effect is a well-known phenomenon in working memory research, characterized by the difficulty of recalling the second occurrence of a repeated item. For instance, in the list “JLBKLMZ”, participants typically struggle to recall the second occurrence of the letter “L”. This effect is commonly explained by response suppression, a mechanism whereby an item is removed from memory once recalled. According to this account, the inhibitory effect should depend on the direction of recall. Consequently, if items are recalled in backward order, participants should instead have difficulties recalling the item that was encoded first. To test this prediction, participants encoded lists of seven letters and recalled them either in forward or backward order across trials. Across three experiments manipulating the presence or absence of repetitions, we failed to consistently replicate the inhibitory Ranschburg effect. These findings call into question the importance of the Ranschburg effect as a benchmark phenomenon for working memory models, its role in supporting response suppression, and consequently the very existence of this mechanism.