Organization revealed by recall orders and confirmed by pauses

The technique introduced here induces the organization of information in memory from systematic inspection of regularities in free recall. The form of the representation of this organization is an “ordered tree.” The technique has the advantage of being based on a theory of the way in which the data were generated and can be shown to produce a unique structure that captures all the kinds of regularities the theory of recall prescribes. Also presented is a collateral technique for measuring the amount of organization evidenced in a struture, as well as a procedure for identifying errors. The experimental work shows the technique's ability to recover the details of an organization presented to subjects and provides converging evidence for the particular structures induced from the pattern of recall pauses. In addition, the application of the technique to structures unknown a priori produced organizations that were easy to interpret and a second set of pauses that further confirmed the details of the induced structures.