Memory for information about sex differences

To test the selective recall hypothesis, male and female adolescents listened to a tape recording of 30 “findings” about sex differences. Fifteen of the findings were pro-female and 15 were anti-female. After being given free recall and then cued recall tests, the subjects completed the British version of the attitudes towards women scale. Multiple regression analysis supported the prediction that males, and those with more negative attitudes to wards women, recalled less pro- and more anti-female items, and vice versa. The importance of selective recall to studies of social cognition is discussed.     

FREE RECALL OF REPEATED WORDS AS A FUNCTION OF INTRALIST VARIABILITY

von W right J. M. Free recall of repeated words as a function of intralist variability. Scand. J. Psychol ., 1972, 13 , 39–42.—Five "critical" words were repeated 4 times each in constant positions within lists of 80 items. The number of different filler words, and the order of the repeated filler words, was varied between lists. In free recall tests total recall was approximately constant, but the recall of the critical words was significantly better the greater the variation in the intralist context of these words, especially the greater the number of different filler words. The results are interpreted in terms of the encoding variability hypothesis.     

Free association,free recall,and stimulated recall compared

Three primary methods of recall (free association, free recall, stimulated recall) and two modifications of them (modified free association, modified stimulated recall) were defined by use of three variables: (a) presence or absence of prior laboratory training, (b) presence or absence of E controlled test stimulation, and (c) test instructions to free associate or to recall Data obtained from approximately 300 Ss and an earlier set of 600 revealed the differential effectiveness of all three primary methods in recall and misrecall.     

部分线索效应中的记忆监控

通过三个实验,利用学习时间分配作为指标,考察了学习者对部分线索效应记忆监控的状况。实验1考察被试在单次学习条件下的学习时间分配情况,结果发现被试在两种条件下所使用的学习时间没有明显差异。这说明在一次学习后被试还不能对部分线索的消极作用进行有效控制。实验2中,经过多次学习后,被试在部分线索条件下使用了更多的学习时间。实验3在自控步调学习前加入回溯性任务难度判断任务,结果发现经过一次学习,部分线索组和自由回忆组的判断值虽无显著差异,但部分线索组的自控步调学习时间显著长于自由回忆组,并且其回忆成绩也显著提高,说明回溯性任务难度判断过程本身是学习时间分配的制约因素。研究说明,为了加速主体对部分线索的消极影响的控制,引导主体对学习任务进行难度判断是一种有效的手段。     

The congruency effect: just what is being learned?

G. H. Bower, S. Thompson-Schill, and E. Tulving (1994) found that when stimulus-response sets in A-B, A-C learning belong to unique categories (congruent-triads), learning appropriate responses appear rapid and memory performance on a modified modified free recall (MMFR) test is enhanced. Bower et al. assumed that category cues protect associations from interpair interference, allowing more rapid learning. However, unlike arbitrary pairs, congruent pairs also allow a reliance on preexperimental associations. As a result, MMFR test performance may not be an unbiased test of what was learned. In the present experiment, free recall (FR) demonstrated that responses were learned approximately equally in all conditions and that the pattern of clustering was compatible with the hypothesis that preexperimental associations continue to play a major role in FR test performance.     

The development of conceptual and rote recall skills among school age children

One hundred eighty children from Grades K, 5, and 9 performed a recall task within one of four instructional conditions: serial recall; standard free recall; labeling free recall; labeling cued recall. The task required that Ss view and recall items from three successively presented sets of categorized pieture stimuli. Controls were imposed upon the associatice relatedness of items within sets so as to minimize the occurrence of associative responding during recall. The clustering data showed that kindergarten and fifth grade children are able to use conceptual skills to effectively mediate recall, but fail to effect these skills on a spontaneous basis in free recall. The results were discussed in line with the hypothesis that young children fail to engage in planful cognitive activity in recall tasks.     

The effects of free recall testing on subsequent source memory

The testing effect is the finding that prior retrieval of information from memory will result in better subsequent memory for that material. One explanation for these effects is that initial free recall testing increases the recollective details for tested information, which then becomes more available during a subsequent test phase. In three experiments we explored this hypothesis using a source-monitoring test phase after the initial free recall tests. We discovered that memory is differentially enhanced for certain recollective details depending on the nature of the free recall task. Thus further research needs to be conducted to specify how different kinds of memorial details are enhanced by free recall testing.     

Measures of free recall of 900 English nouns: Correlations with imagery,concreteness, meaningfulness,and frequency

Forty groups of subjects were given six lists of 25 nouns each for immediate free written recall. A measure of free recall was thereby obtained for each of 900 nouns in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms, each noun’s measure based on the recall of 32 subjects. First-order correlations showed recall to be correlated with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, Thorndike-Lorge frequency, and Kuěra-Francis frequency. Partial correlations showed meaningfulness to be essentially unrelated to recall and concreteness only moderately related. In contrast to previous comparisons, which were based on smaller ranges of frequency and were more susceptible to list-specific effects, imagery and frequency were found to be approximately equal in their influence on free recall.     

Cued vs. free recall in long-term memory of the fifty united states

Subjects were asked to recall the names of the fifty United States under varied conditions. These conditions included free recall and cued recall. The recall of the fifty United States was poorer than expected for college students. The average recall was approximately 41 out of 50 states. When subjects were asked to fill in the names of the states on a blank map, recall dropped to approximately 32 out of 50 states. It appears that subjects can recall some states better than others. For example, recall is better for states in close proximity to a subject’s current residence. Perhaps subjects have a geographic bubble when it comes to recalling the names of the states.     

The total time hypothesis,recall strategies,and memory for rapidly presented word strings

In three experiments the free recall of rapidly presented word strings was studied. The word strings were shown either in grammatical order or a scrambled order. It was found that the invariance of recall with various presentation times for grammatical sequences breaks down at presentation times between 175 and 250 msec. The order of recall, however, remains consistent with the type of sequence presented irrespective of presentation time. The amount of time requked to utilize syntactic information fully in free recall is of approximately the same order of magnitude as that required to read the words.     

Memory strategies in children with learning disabilities

Memory strategies were examined among children, 7–13 years old, with diagnosed learning disabilities, in order to investigate whether they perform in appropriately active and efficient ways. The children were grouped at two age levels and administered tasks of serial recall and free recall. A strategy-training session was conducted on the second task. On the serial recall, neither age group showed evidence of rehearsal, in contrast to previous studies. On the free recall task, the younger children's performance was consistent with the mediation deficiency hypothesis, while the older children improved in sorting, clustering, and recall following training; i.e., they showed a typical production deficiency. There was support for considering this sample of learning disabled children as inactive learners, with potential developmental change. Serial recall improved with age, and the older children's production deficiences in free recall appeared to be ameliorated with training in organizational strategies.     

Three estimates of the word span and their stability over the adult years

Three estimates of the immediate word span were compared in groups of men representing each decade between the ages of 20 and 69 years. No systematic change with age was found in free recall or in partial recall requiring the reproduction of the unrepeated word in lists of four to seven items. When the instruction was to report the entire list but leave the unrepeated word last, performance steadily deteriorated with age. Mean success in recall decreased on three criteria, and error by false terminal placement increased from each decade to the next. The results support the hypothesis that capacity to perform simultaneously two such operations as sub-vocal rehearsal of one item and vocal enumeration of the other items shrinks with the advancing years. This interpretation of the findings agrees with other observations about age-related changes in perceptual-motor skills and cognitive capacity, and indicates the manner in which an increased propensity to forgetfulness with the advancing years originates in immediate memory. It is also noted that in the general population the immediate word span is well below that determined in college students, even under the least exacting conditions of free recall, and that the additional requirement to search for, select and test a required item does not further restrict the word span below the age of 50.     

Phonological short-term store and the nature of the recency effect: Evidence from neuropsychology

The recency effect in immediate recall of lists of unrelated words was investigated in P.V., a left hemisphere-damaged patient, who had a grossly reduced auditory verbal span, attributed to a selective impairment of a phonological short-term store. No recency effect was evident in free recall of auditorily presented material. When the patient was instructed to recall the final items of the list first, the recency performance remained defective, even though P.V. was able to adopt a recall from end order. In the case of visual presentation, P.V.'s free recall performance was within the normal range and a clear recency occurred in the recall from end condition. These results are consistent with the view that the standard recency effect in immediate free recall of auditorily presented material represents the output of a phonological short-term store to which ordinal retrieval strategies, in P.V.'s case unimpaired, are applied. Finally, the contributions of the phonological short-term store and the process of rehearsal to the recency effect and to immediate memory span performance are discussed.     

Interactive presentation in multitrial free recall

This paper explores whether free recall performance and organization can be facilitated using computer-controlled interactive presentation, where stimulus presentation on Trial N+1 depends on the individual subject’s prior recall history. A series of experiments investigated the effects of two types of response-contingent presentation order manipulations and of selective tagging manipulation designed to highlight the presentation of previously nonrecalled items. An initial experiment using 20-word lists showed no differences among groups, due to a ceiling effect. Two subsequent experiments, using longer lists (30 and 40 words), found that recall and subjective organization were increased by selective tagging and by presentation orders that preserved the subject’s prior order of recall. The results demonstrate that subjects’ previous recall histories contain information that can be used to facilitate recall. The potential of other interactive manipulations is discussed.     

Recall initiation strategies must be controlled in training studies that use immediate free recall tasks to measure the components of working memory capacity across time

There has been great interest in using working memory (WM) training regimens as an alternative treatment for ADHD, but it has recently been concluded that existing training regimens may not be optimally designed because they target the primary memory component but not the secondary component of WM capacity. This conclusion requires the ability to accurately measure changes in primary and secondary memory abilities over time. The immediate free recall task has been used in previous studies to measure these changes; however, one concern with these tasks is that the recall order required on training exercises may influence the recall strategy used during free recall, which may in turn influence the relative number of items recalled from primary and secondary memory. To address this issue, previous training studies have explicitly controlled recall strategy before and after training. However, the necessity of controlling for recall strategies has not been explicitly tested. The present study investigated the effects of forward-serial-order training on free recall performance under conditions in which recall strategy was not controlled using a sample of adolescents with ADHD. Unlike when recall order was controlled, the main findings showed selective improvement of the secondary memory component (as opposed to the primary memory component) when recall order was uncontrolled. This finding advances our understanding of WM training by highlighting the importance of controlling for recall strategies when free recall tasks are used to measure changes in the primary and secondary components of WM across time.     

Structural and transient components of memory

The decomposition of free recall serial position curves into permanent and transient components (primary and secondary memory, Waugh & Norman, 1965) is widely accepted. In this paper, a hypothesis is proposed directly relating the permanent memory component to a vector quantity which reflects sequential allocation of attention during encoding. In conjunction with a previously published model for encoding and retrieval in free recall (Hogan, 1975), the hypothesis is shown to break down predicted serial position curves into permanent and transient components, in a manner analogous to but in various ways less restrictive than the decomposition proposed by Waugh and Norman.     

The spacing effect in young children’s free recall: Support for automatic-process explanations

The effect of spacing repetitions on children's free recall was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, both 4-year-old children and 7-year-old children exhibited a spacing effect in free recall, and the magnitude of the effect did not change with age. In Experiment 2, free recall was examined as a function of spacing, age (3 years old vs. 4 years old) and presentation rate (1 vs. 2 vs. 5 sec per stimulus). A spacing effect was obtained that did not differ as a function of age or presentation rate. Of particular interest was the fact that 3-year-olds exhibited a strong spacing effect even when stimuli were presented at a very rapid 1-sec rate. The results support the hypothesis that fundamental memory mechanisms that operate relatively automatically are sufficient to produce a spacing effect in free recall.     

Memory for concrete and abstract words in bilingual speakers

The dual-code hypothesis of Paivio was taken to imply that bilingual speakers should show poorer memory for the language in which concrete words appeared than the language in which abstract words appeared. The results of two experiments with German-English bilinguals, one using a recognition memory procedure and the other using the free recall task, found the opposite state of affairs. Semantic recognition, free recall, and memory for language of occurrence were all found to be superior for concrete words. Two hypotheses were advanced. One, called the "cultural imagery hypothesis," assumes that images may be culture specific, while the other hypothesis interprets the outcome in terms of the relations between stored attributes. An analysis of the experiment as an attribute-memory procedure is presented.     

The effect of encoding variables on the free recall of words and action events

On the basis of previously determined properties, it was hypothesized that, whereas the free recall of words is a strategic memory test, the free recall of action events in the form of tasks performed by the subject is nonstrategic. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, some presented items were designated as being more important to remember than others. Although this encoding manipulation had a marked effect on word recall, its effect on task recall was minimal In Experiment 2, the encoding impact of events was measured by having subjects rate, during presentation, how likely they were to recall each event on a subsequent test. The ratings showed good predictive power for the recall of words, but not of action events. These results were accepted as further support for a strategic/nonstrategic distinction between word and task recall.     

The emergence of strategic knowledge activation in categorical clustering during retrieval

Elementary school children's free recall clustering has recently been explained as an automatic by-product of their developing knowledge base. In contrast, it is claimed that as children get older they become aware of the usefulness of category organization as a memory strategy that enables them to strategically activate category knowledge even during retrieval. To test this hypothesis an experimental procedure was developed where Ss first had to learn items in a noncategorical order to the criterion of two perfect serial recall trials. After a 12- to 15-min retention interval Ss unexpectedly received either serial or free recall (or--in Experiment 1--cued recall) instructions. In three experiments with second and fourth graders it was shown that (1) fourth graders' recall exceeded that of second graders only in the free, but not in the serial (or cued), recall condition, (2) higher levels of clustering were observed for fourth graders in the free recall condition, and (3) the grade effect on free recall data was eliminated when the influence of metamemory and categorical clustering statistically was partialled out (Experiments 1 and 3). This pattern of results proved robust against variants in which a metamemory question was asked or omitted prior to recall (Experiment 2) and manipulations in which age differences in categorical knowledge were minimized (Experiment 3). The results were interpreted as demonstrating fourth graders' strategic competence in activating category knowledge during retrieval and second graders' automatic knowledge activation.