Categorized and uncategorized attributes as recall cues: The phenomenon of limited access

Our most general proposition is that access to a memory unit is limited to those cues which specify the identifying property of the unit. In our first experiment we had subjects categorize a colored shape by either its shape or color property. Recall for the other member of a unit was faster and better when the cue was the categorized rather than the uncategorized property. In a subsequent experiment evidence was presented which suggested that the asymmetry of the two types of cues was an access rather than an associative asymmetry. Finally, we found that retrieval latency to the uncategorized cue decreased sharply as list length was decreased, while very little effect was evident for the categorized cue, suggesting different retrieval processes for the two types of cues. We are led to infer that when a unit is stored it is also classified and that direct access to that unit is only possible via cues which are specified in the classification system.