Encoding specificity: Fact or artifact

Santa, John L.; Lamwers, Linda L.

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(74)80019-8

Cited by 79 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It thus becomes reasonable to conclude that the subjects' reaction to the novelty of the cues in what they perceived as an essentially associative task was largely responsible for previously reported failures of strong extralist cues to POSTMAN facilitate recall. The effects of instructions concerning the relation between TBR words and cues (Santa & Lamwers, 1974) are consistent with this interpretation. Such instructions represent, of course, a direct intervention in the subjects' recall strategies.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

“…(b) The shift from weak to strong cues produced much larger decrements when the frequency of usage of the TBR words was high rather than low, presumably because variability of encoding is directly related to frequency (Reder, Anderson, & Bjork, 1974). (c) When Santa and Lamwers (1974) informed subjects about the associative relationship between strong extralist cues and TBR words, recall was greatly enahcned and far superior to uncued recall. In that study, recognition on a multiple-choice test, with high associates of the strong cues as distractors, was better than uncued recall or recall to the strong cues.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Postman

1975

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Two empirical tests of the principle of encoding specificity are reported. In Experiment I, the normative strength of the cues presented on the input and on the recall trial was varied factorially. To lessen the emphasis on strictly associative learning, only half the items were cued in each phase of the study-recall cycle. Recall was higher when the cues remained the same than when they changed. However, regardless of the condition of input cuing, strong output cues were substantially more effective than weak ones. In Experiment II, the to-be-remembered words were shown in the presence of weak cues on the input trial. Recognition in the context of strong extralist cues was compared with recall to the original input cues. On the test of cued recognition, the target words were either generated by the subjects as free associates or presented to them as items on a test constructed by the experimenter. Contrary to previous findings. recall was not found to be superior to recognition. The phenomena of cue-dependent forgetting that have been interpreted as evidence for the principle of encoding specificity appear to have limited generality.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Postman

1975

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To alleviate the problem of the surprise switch from weak to strong associates in the final list for participants in the strong-cue condition, Santa and Lamwers (1974) told participants in the warning group that the cues were not presented in the study list, but that some of them were strong associates of the target words. This small inclusion had a dramatic effect on performance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are two important points to be made about the reinterpretation of Thomson and Tulving's (1970) and Santa and Lamwers's (1974) results in terms of the SDT framework. First, it is clear that not all researchers are considering report bias and its effect on indices of recall performance in their experiments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strong cues are not necessarily weak: Thomson and Tulving (1970) and the encoding specificity principle revisited

Higham

2002

Mem Cogn

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Performance on tests in which there is control over reporting (e.g., cued recall with the option to withhold responses) can be characterizedby four parameters: free-and forced-report retrieval(correct responses retrieved from memory when the option to withhold responses is exercised and when it is not, respectively),monitoring (discrimination between correct and incorrect potential responses), and report bias (willingness to report responses). Typically, researchers do not examine all these components in cued-test performance; blanks are sometimes counted the same as errors, meaning that the (free-report) performance index is contaminated with report bias and monitoring ability. In this research, a two-stage testing procedure is described that allows measures of free-and forced-report retrieval, monitoring, and bias to be derived from the original encoding specificity experiments (Thomson & Tulving, 1970). The results show that their cue-reinstatement manipulation affected free-report retrieval, but once report bias and monitoring effects were removed by forcing output, retrieval was unaffected.

show abstract

“…A number of investigators (Martin, 1975;Reder, Anderson, & Bjork, 1974;Roediger & Adelson, 1980;Santa & Lamwers, 1974) have advanced the argument that the pairing of two words results in the arousal of a very specific contextual meaning that necessarily alters the hierarchy of the strength of association of other words to the pair. For example, Tulving and Thomson's (1973) study paired the target COLD with a supposedly weak associate, GROUND, during encoding.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic relations between encoding and retrieval in cued recall

Low

Roder

1983

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Two experiments were conducted to test the encoding-specificity hypothesis. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented pairs of coordinates to study, followed by a cued-recall test. Semantically weak and strong coordinates (defined by the degree of featural overlap shared with the pairs) served as encoding and retrieval cues. The semantic strength of the retrieval cue proved to be the most important factor in recall, whereas the re-presentation of an unrelated cue previously seen during encoding led to no facilitation of recall. In Experiment 2, three noun coordinates of varied semantic interrelatedness were presented for study and then were cued for recall by novel semantically strong or weak coordinates. Maximum recall was achieved when a strong encoding condition was matched with a strong retrieval cue. Implications of these findings for an encoding-specificityhypothesis were discussed.

show abstract

Encoding specificity: Fact or artifact

Cited by 79 publications

References 13 publications

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Tests of the generality of the principle of encoding specificity

Strong cues are not necessarily weak: Thomson and Tulving (1970) and the encoding specificity principle revisited

Semantic relations between encoding and retrieval in cued recall

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About