The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the interrelationships among a number of episodic memory tasks, with a special interest in determining the correlations among various attributes of memory. The attributes investigated included imagery, associative, acoustic, temporal, affective, and frequency. The tasks were free recall, paired associates, serial, verbal discrimination, classical recognition, and memory span, as well as less frequently used tasks. The 200 undergraduate subjects were tested for 10 sessions, and 28 different measures of episodic memory were obtained from the tasks. In addition, five measures of semantic memory were available.All scores were initially intercorrelated. Measures of episodic memory and semantic memory were generally unrelated. Among the measures of episodic learning, clustering was found to be unrelated to performance on other tasks. This was also true for the double-function verbal-discrimination task and for a task designed specifically to measure susceptibility to interference. Twenty-two of the measures of episodic memory were included in a factor analysis from which five factors emerged-factors which were closely tied to tasks. One factor was tied to freerecall tasks, another to paired-associate and serial tasks. Memory span, including span for digits and for letters of high and low acoustic similarity, constituted a third factor. A fourth factor involved verbal-discrimination lists, and frequency assimilation and classical recognition constituted a fifth.The failure of attributes to form factors seems to have been due to two contrary forces. First, among tasks in which associative learning is required, the individual differences in associative learning are so strong that any additional variation that might be produced by attributes has little influence. The fundamental problem is to understand associative learning, and the attribute conception has little to contribute to this issue. Second, there was some evidence that experienced subjects can set aside attributes when use of the attributes as a, basis for responding produces interference. The presence of attributes in memory and the utilization of attributes for responding are two independent matters.

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Four studies examined the MP-DP effect (spacing effect) in four quite different situations: recognition of letters, verbal discrimination, short free recall lists, and recall of MP items presented twice, with an intervening interval inserted to produce forgetting. MP-DP differences were found in all studies. Of particular interest were three interactions. Subjects with a low criterion of responding in the letter study lost the MP-DP effect over a 30-sec delay, and subjects with a high criterion did not. A clear MP-DP effect, but no lag effect, was found only with unmixed verbal discrimination lists. In free recall, a sharp lag effect was shown for words presented three times but not for words presented twice. A forgetting interval inserted between the two occurrences of an MP item did not appreciably aid its recall. The results were found to pose severe problems for current theoretical ideas about the spacing effect.

The purpose of this study was to determine if associative learning tasks involve two or more relatively independent factors (as suggested by an earlier study). To that end, 12 tasks were constructed; 3 were " standard" (paired associate, free recall, serial), and the others represented transition tasks between the standard tasks. The purpose was to see if factors (as determined by a factor analysis) changed in a meaningful way as the transition was made from one task to another. Some response units were single words, some were word triads; some of the word triads were meaningless, some formed sentences. Paired associate lists also differed in terms of the number of response terms to be associated with a single stimulus term. The 12 tasks were learned by 97 subjects. Two relatively stable highly correlated factors emerged, one involving free recall and serial tasks, the other involving paired associate tasks. This does not confirm the earlier work; the reason for this discrepancy is not known. Again, however, the data emphasized the importance of individual differences in associative learning in contrast to the relatively minor role of the Subject by Task interaction.A recent factor analysis of the performance scores from a wide variety of verbal learning tasks showed that free recall learning on the one hand, and serial and paired associate learning on the other , were associated with two different factors (Underwood , Boruch , & Malrni, 1978) . This was puzzling in that all three tasks seem to require the development and utilization of associations ; although just what the associations develop between may be debatable. However, the puzzle is present only if it is assumed that all associative learning is the same in kind regardless Of the tasks in which the associations are developed. To say this another way, the puzzle is present only if it is assumed that there are no qualitative differences in associations. It may be that the associations that develop in free recall learning are qualita tively differen t from those that develop in serial and paired associate learning. The present study was designed to explore this possibility. The approach was to develop transition tasks that in terms of the requirements imposed for learning fell between the "pure" tasks. Thus, as an ostensible paired associate task becomes more and more like a free recall task , the factor loadings should shift if the associations for the two pure tasks are qualitatively different. It seemed possible, furthermore, that if associations can be qualitatively different, some of the transition tasks might produce unique factors.In the previous study, the different tasks were constructed without particular concern for the words used. Thus, it is possible that the words used in constructing the free recall lists differed on a number of characteristics from those used to construct the serial and paired associate lists. As a consequence , it is at least remotely possible that word .differences and not task differences were responsible for the appea...

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The first experiment determined whether frequency context would affect recognition memory decisions and frequency judgments. In the high-frequency context condition, 5 words were presented at study six times each prior to the section of the list containing the target items. In the low-frequency context condition, 30 words were presented at study one time each prior to the targets. The items tested were the same in the two conditions and were presented one, two, or three times each. Recognition performance and the judged frequency of target items presented once at study was higher in the high-frequency context condition than in the low-frequency context condition, but the opposite was true for items presented three times at study. The results of three subsequent recognition memory experiments suggested that encoding processes were critically involved.