Recall and measures of memory organization.

Cooke, Nancy; Durso, Francis T.; Schvaneveldt, Roger W.

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.12.4.538

Cited by 108 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Previous research on free recall has focused on semantic relations between list items (e.g., Brown, Conover, Flores, & Goodman, 1991;Cooke, Durso, & Schvaneveldt, 1986;Romney, Brewer, & Batchelder, 1993;see Shuell, 1969, for a review of the earlier literature) to the exclusion of association by contiguity. Some potential reasons for this were discussed in the introduction.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Associative retrieval processes in free recall

1996

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

I present a new method for analyzing associative processes in free recall. Whileprevious research has emphasized the prominence of semantic organization, the present method illustrates the importance of association by contiguity. This is done by examining conditional response probabilities in the output sequence. For a given item recalled, I examine the probability and latency that it follows an item from a nearby or distant input position. These conditional probabilities and latencies, plotted as a function of the lag between studied items, reveal several regularities about output order in free recall. First, subjects tend to recall items more often and more rapidly from adjacent input positions than from remote input positions. Second, subjects are about twice as likely to recall adjacent pairs in the forward than in the backward direction and are significantly faster in doing so. These effects are observed at all positions in the output sequence. The asymmetry effect is theoretically significant because, in cued recall, nearly symmetric retrieval is found at all serial positions (Kahana, 1995;Murdock, 1962). An attempt is made to fit the search of associative memory model (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980 with and without symmetric interitem associations to these data. Other models of free recall are also discussed.The finding that subjects, when told to recall a list of items "in any order," recall categorically or associatively related items in neighboring output positions has provided a foundation for much of the organizational theorizing on human memory. One might even argue that it was these findings which caused a shift from the study of paired associate learning and serial recall in the 1950s and early 1960s to the study of free recall in the mid to late 1960s. Research on serial recall was long concerned with distinguishing theories of positional associations from chained associations (Harcum, 1975), whereas research on free recall focused on interitem similarity and context-to-item associations as the bases for retrieval (Shuell, 1969;Tulving, 1968).What happened to the idea that items studied for free recall are related by virtue of their contiguity? Asch and Ebenholz (1962) found that during free recall only 18% of the total number of sequential responses matched adjacent sequences oflist items in the forward order. They also found no significant difference in the overall number offorward and backward transitions (not necessarily adjacent).' On the basis of these findings, they concluded that "the order in which items were produced in free recall (which registered the course of acquisition) did not correspond notably to the order of earlier experience" (Asch & Ebenholz, 1962, p. 19).

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Associative retrieval processes in free recall

1996

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This ANOVAconfirmed the observations described above, showing a main effect of age [F(1,58) There have been two basic approaches to the measurement oforganization in free recall. One approach has been to measure the degree to which participants' output order is consistent with the semantic relations among list items (e.g., Cooke, Durso, & Schvaneveldt, 1986;Romney et aI., 1993;see Shuell, 1969, for a review of the early literature). Another approach has been to measure organization as the consistency of output order across successive recall trials (see , for a review).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A functional relation between learning and organization in free recall

Kahana

Wingfield

2000

Psychon Bull Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is well known that multitrial free recall is accompanied by increased organization of output over learning trials, even when the order of presentation is randomized. Wecompared the relation between learning and organization in 30 young and 30 older adults as they learned categorized materials to a criterion of 1009{, recall. The importance of this age manipulation was that it allowed us to examine, using two groups that differ significantly in their learning ability, whether organization and learning follow the same function. A., was expected, older adults showed less organization on any given learning trial. However, when equated for degree of learning, the older adults showed approximately the same level of organization as the young. This finding suggests that the organization-learning relation remains invariant in the face of significant differences in participants' mnemonic abilities.No issue is more fundamental to our understanding of human learning than the relationship between learning and organization. Recent years have seen a renewal of interest in output order effects in free recall (Brainerd, Reyna, Harnishfeger,

show abstract

“…PF has also been found to predict free recall order and category/dimensional judgment time (Cooke, Durso, & Schvaneveldt, 1986;Cooke, 1992). There is also evidence that PF differentiates between experts and nonexperts (Cook, 1992).…”

Section: Psychometricsmentioning

confidence: 96%