Association Strength as a Mediating Variable in Verbal Categorizing and Recall: Preliminary Report

Measuring the strength, structure, and reliability of free associations.

“…The applications have been numerous, especially those involving the use of comparisons of associative response distributions to two or more stimuli, based on group data. Similarities between associative distributions have been used to index, for instance, the number of perceived categories in a word list (Willner & Reitz, 1965), social class differences in France and the United States (Rosenzweig, 1964;Rosenzweig & Miller, 1966), the perceived semantic similarity of pairs of adjectives (Cofer, 1957), the difference in associational properties of single and multiple stimuli (P. M. Jenkins & Cofer, 1957), and, importantly, the factorial structure of associative hierarchies (Deese, 1962(Deese, , 1964(Deese, , 1965Howe, 1966;Pollio, 1966).…”

Association, abstraction, and the conceptual organization of recall: Implications for clinical tests.

“…The contribution to experimental psychology could reside in the area of interrelations between abstraction and recall, in what might be termed the conceptual organization of recall. This interrelation between abstraction and recall is illustrated by two experiments, Willner and Reitz (1965) and Object Sorting Experiment III in this study. In the former, stimulus materials from an experiment in verbal recall were substituted as stimuli in an experiment in verbal abstraction, and by means of a knowledge of the associative meaning of the stimuli, precise predictions were confirmed about their functioning as an abstraction task.…”

“…OBJECT SORTING EXPERIMENT III This experiment extended the investigation of Willner and Reitz (1965) in three ways: (a) The stimuli used were objects rather than words; (b) The substitution was made in the opposite direction from Willner and Reitz (1965), that is, an abstraction task was transformed into a test of recall in Experiment III, rather than a recall task transformed into an abstraction test as in the earlier study; (c) The conceptual organization of recall was investigated by asking 5s to recall the objects from the BRL Object Sorting Test after brief exposure, and ascertaining the extent to which their recall was conceptually organized,…”

“…The Index of Total Association (ITA), developed by Marshall and Cofer (1963) for studying verbal recall, was adapted here for use in studying abstraction in the BRL Test. The rationale for use of the ITA in investigations of abstraction was the hypothesis that similar associative processes are essential variables in both abstraction and recall (Willner & Reitz, 1965).…”

“…The experimental techniques pioneered by the authors cited offer the possibility of precise empirical investigations of the conceptual organization of memory. Willner and Reitz (1965) investigated the hypothesis that associative processes function as a common mediating process for abstraction and verbal recall, and also suggested further investigation of the conceptual organization of recall. Deese's (1959) experiment demonstrating the strong effect of association upon verbal recall was partially replicated with abstraction substituted as the dependent variable.…”