Hypermnesia (increased recall levels associated with increasing retention intervals) is examined, along with the related phenomenon of reminiscence (the recall of previously unrecallable items). A historical survey of the reminiscence literature is presented, and it is concluded that the decline in interest in the phenomenon during the 1930s and 1940s was partly attributable to changes in how reminiscence was denned and conceptualized. Recent experimental work that has renewed interest in the hypermnesia phenomenon is reviewed, along with two theoretical explications of hypermnesia and the attempts to test them. However, neither theoretical interpretation provides a complete account of hypermnesia. Finally, the experimental literature on repeated testing is examined in order to ascertain which factors affect the likelihood of obtaining hypermnesia. Among the primary factors that apparently affect hypermnesia are the type of study items (pictures produce greater hypermnesia than words) and the length of the recall periods used, with longer recall periods being more likely to produce hypermnesia than shorter periods. Because hypermnesia in the repeated test paradigm depends on both the rate of item recovery and the rate of intertest forgetting, future research should consider more closely the factors that affect intertest forgetting and the recovery of new items.At one time or another, we have all been unable to recollect some previously learned fact or piece of information, only to find later that the sought-after information easily comes to mind. This phenomenon was first studied experimentally by Ballard (1913), who coined the term reminiscence to refer to "the remembering again of the forgotten without re-learning" (Ballard, 1913, p. v). Ballard presented subjects (usually young school children) with a set of to-be-remembered (TBR) materials and then, after various retention intervals, administered several recall tests. His results showed that under a variety of study and testing conditions, subjects' recall performance actually improved across the repeated tests.At first glance Ballard's data seem somewhat counterintuitive, because based on either folk wisdom or the results of experimental research (e.g., Ehhinghaus, 1885Ehhinghaus, /1964, one would assume that memory performance should be best immediately after studying the TBR materials and that performance should decline as the retention interval increases. However, despite increased retention intervals across the repeated tests, Ballard's subjects often recalled more on the later tests than on the initial test. Ballard's data thus seemed to show that memory performance sometimes improves with increasing retention intervals.
This meta-analysis shows a small but significant improvement in survival and a major improvement in tumor control in the thorax in patients receiving thoracic radiation therapy. However, this is achieved at the cost of a small increase in treatment-related mortality.
Five experiments examined the hypothesis that hypermnesia (improved recall across repeated tests) can be predicted from cumulative recall levels. Contrary to this view. Experiments 1 and 1A demonstrated that when the cumulative recall levels for pictures and words were equated, pictures still produced a larger hypermnesic effect. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that varying test length (and thus recall level) has no effect on the magnitude of the hypermnesic effect. In Experiment 4 subjects studied a categorized word list and then received one 21-min test or three 7-min tests. Results suggested that (a) similar retrieval processes are used in these two conditions and (b) hypermnesia in the repeated test paradigm results from subjects generating covert cues to aid item recovery across tests. Taken together, the present results suggest that although hypermnesia is related to cumulative recall levels, various other factors (e.g., item type) modulate the magnitude of the hypermnesia by affecting item accessibility across tests. It is argued that changes in item accessibility across tests, caused by learning during testing, play a major role in producing hypermnesia in both episodic and semantic memory tasks.In recent years there has been considerable interest in the phenomenon of improved memory performance associated with repeated testing. In a seminal study Erdelyi and Becker (1974, Experiment I) presented subjects with a list of pictures and concrete nouns, and then administered three successive recall tests. They found that the net recall level for pictures increased across tests, whereas the net recall level for words tended to remain constant. Erdelyi and Becker termed the improvement in net recall they obtained with pictures hypermnesia to contrast it with amnesia, or forgetting.There have been numerous demonstrations of the hypermnesic effect (e.g.
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