Subjects were shown letters of the alphabet and asked to name the letter in the alphabet immediately before or after the probe letter. Subjects were also asked to describe how they accessed the alphabet and from what point in the alphabet they began their search. The structure of the reaction times (RTs) and subjects' reports on alphabetic entry points are accounted for by a model of alphabetic storage and retrieval. The model is a particularization of well-established general theories of the structure of long-term memory. The alphabet is represented as a two-level hierarchical list structure composed of six chunks that are in turn composed of from two to seven letters. Probe letters have direct access only to the name of the chunk in which they are embedded, and alphabetic access consists of serial, self-terminating search at each level. A model using only a single parameter for the time required to access the next element at either the chunk or letter level accounts for about 50% of the variance in RTs for our two experiments. A two-parameter model accounts for over 80% of the variance in previously published studies of covert and overt alphabet recitation.

Two experiments explored the ability of college students to use a rating scale to predict during study which of the to-be-remembered items they would be able to retrieve in a later test of recall. The memory tasks involved paired-associate learning of lists of unrelated nouns and memory for sentences cued by the initial words. Probability of recall was systematically related to predictions in all conditions. Accuracy of prediction was found to increase with prior study experience with the rated material in the absence of prior test trials, although substantial prediction appears possible even when predictions are made on the initial, and only, study trial. There was considerable commonality in the ratings of items across individuals, but also evidence of an idiosyncratic component suggesting that the ratings reflect, at least in part, a monitoring based on privileged access by the individual to his or her own encoding and storage operations. Ability to predict accurately which items would be recalled bore little or no relation to memory ability as indexed by the number of items recalled.

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Does the poorer performance of older people in laboratory tests of episodic memory result from metamemory problems? Memory of 20 young and 20 old adults for 60 "unrelated" paired associates was measured by an associative matching task. Two metamemory measures also were taken: Each pair was rated at the time of study for the likelihood that the person would recall it (prediction measure) and on the matching task each response pairing was judged as to its correctness (response evaluation measure). Young adults were correct on 50% of the associative matches, old only 30%. The two groups did not differ in the predictive metamemory measure: Both were able to predict relative memorability. Old persons, however, underestimated task difficulty (i.e., they overestimated the number of correct associative matches they would make, whereas the young did not). Both groups were quite accurate in the response evaluation measure.

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