Selective attention and relevance-irrelevance in recall

Abstract.— Recall of relevant and irrelevant items was examined under different types of set, where selection was procured either by a figural or a cognitive attribute of the items. Letters and digits were differentiated by their colour or position (S-set), or by their mutual class (R-set). Recall of irrelevant items proved consistently poorer with selection based on S-set than on R-set. the effect beeing enhanced, the greater the number of items involved. Response latency increased with number of items, being greatest under R-set. The differentiation between relevant and irrelevant categories thus appeared more effective with selection procured by figural attributes, which suggests different levels of information processing of these categories under the two types of set.