The present article is the first in a series of three that use both response time and accuracy to explore the processes of recognition and cued recall, and the relation between these. This article examines recognition; free response reaction time distributions, and signal-to-respond accuracy growth curves are both reported, for conditions varying both list length and study time. Varying list length and study time had a large effect on accuracy, but a small or negligible effect on free response RT distributions and retrieval dynamics in signal-to-respond, providing strong constraints for modeling. The free response data were well fit with an Element Sampling Model, and with a variant combining an extension of the SAM model for cued recall (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980, 1981) with the Element Sampling Model. The combined model also provided a good fit to the signal-to-respond data, when most of the free response parameter values were retained Alternative. models are discussed.