Clustering and organization in free recall.

Shuell, Thomas J.

doi:10.1037/h0028141

Cited by 200 publications

(123 citation statements)

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“…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.…”

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Associative retrieval processes in free recall

1996

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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).

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Associative retrieval processes in free recall

1996

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“…It is commonly held that when subjects process instances of a category they also covertly process the category label as well (Bousfield, 1953;Shuell, 1969). If this notion has any validity, then the present sorting of category labels should be able to predict how subjects might sort instances of these categories.…”

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Cross-category structure in semantic memory

et al. 1975

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“…Shuell (1969) indicates that Determan and Brown (1974) found increases in item retention related to total study t ime in both ordinal and free recall , while increases in order retention were a function of study time per item. Bugelski (1968Bugelski ( , 1974 presented data which indicate that choice of encoding method may influence the rate at which correct ordinal position is achieved in the learning of short serial lists and that the use of imagery associations for learn ing ser ial lists increased both total recall and the numbe r of …”

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confidence: 91%