Memory for words recently classified

Abstract

Thi: paper describe s research whose goal is to determine the implications 01' verbal classificatory judgrnents for recognition rneruorv and recall. TOII'ard this end, Ss were required to answer 100 queries 01' attribution and superordlnaticn Ils a TW[NGI:: sudden? Is SP1~ACH ecstatic? Is a CORKSCREW an opener Is a DCNGEO;-'; 1 scholar") befare being tested unexpectedly on their ability to rernernber either the uppercase "keywords" or the lowercase "descriptors." l.exical mernorv did not depend on whether a ward had been part 01' an attribu tiv, or a superordinate query. But words from "incongruous" queries almost invariably were more poorly remembered-under conditions 01' free recall, cued recall. and recognition mernorv-than word s from "congruous" querie s. Ccngruous cues, but not incongruous ones, greatly facilitated recall. with keyword s being morc effective cues than descriptors. Recognition mernory 01' keywords was uniforrnly superior to that 01' descriptors. It is argued that the large and pervasive mernorial advantages 01' congruity arise because a congruous query, unlike an incongruous one, fosters a relational encoding 01' keyword and descriptor.

Acquisition-test interactions between

“…Specifically, Baker and Santa reported that recognition of incongruous items in old contexts was superior to recognition of congruous items in old contexts (.79 vs..70). This finding is at odds with data reported by others (e.g., Arnold, Bower, & Bobrow, 1972;Craik & Tulving, 1975;Schulman, 1974). While recognizing the inconsistencies in usage of the term incongruous, the present experiments employed the term incongruous as it was used in the Baker and Santa (1977) study.…”

“…It should be noted, however, that Baker and Santa's incongruous condition is unlike the incongruous conditions of other recent experiments. For instance, compare Baker and Santa's incongruous sentence, "The TRUCK was parked on top of the high school" to Schulman's (1974) queries (e.g., Is VELVET brave? "), or to Craik and Tulving's (1975) sentences (e.g., "The boy met a on the street: SPEECH").…”

The effects of search criteria and retrieval cue availability on memory for words

“…For example, Craik and Tulving (1975) noted that in the classification tasks they used, words that were responded to positively (i.e., category members) were generally better recalled and recognized than were words responded to negatively. Indeed, they introduced the notion of elaboration in order to explain this result, arguing that positive instances could be encoded in an integrated fashion with the encoding question because they were "congruous" with it (Schulman, 1974), whereas negative Johnson-Laird et al's (1978) Experiment 2, employing component-search instructions in addition to the targetsearch instructions they had used. Clearly, for the target-search condition, the same results obtained by Johnson-Laird et al would be predicted on the basis of either an "amount-of-processing" or a "number of retrieval cues" hypothesis.…”

How much “effort” should be devoted to memory?

“…The questions referred to either one or two attributes of each word, and the answer could be either yes or no. Both of these manipulations have previously been found to encourage broader or more elaborate encoding (Craik & Tulving, 1975;Klein & Saltz, 1976;Shulman, 1974). While answering the questions about the words, subjects were also required to respond to either a visual or an auditory signal, and reaction time to the signal was taken as the measure of cognitive effort.…”