Hypermnesia and reminiscence in recall: A historical and empirical review.

Abstract

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.

Source memory for unrecognized items: Predictions from multivariate signal detection theory

“…However, the fact that participants made recognition and source judgments on separate tests may introduce an interpretive difficulty. Specifically, one could claim that some words that were not recognized on the first test were nevertheless recognized when they appeared on the second test, in a type of reminiscence effect (Payne, 1987). We have concluded that our results demonstrate accurate source memory for unrecognized items, but the results may in truth demonstrate accurate source memory for items recognized on the second test but not the first.…”

Trichotomous processes in early memory development, aging, and neurocognitive impairment: A unified theory.

“…Thus, manipulations that increase the contribution of direct access to performance, ought to increase true recall and reduce false recall, whereas manipulations that increase the contribution of reconstruction to performance ought to increase false recall and may also reduce true recall or leave it unchanged (because reconstruction does not recover targets as reliably as direct access does; Brainerd et al, 2003). For instance, it is well known that intrusions that preserve the meaning of studied items tend to appear near the ends of free-recall protocols (e.g., Payne, 1987), which is congruent with the notion that intrusions are by-products of an error-prone operation that waxes during the later stages of recall. However, other recall patterns are more diagnostic of the direct access/reconstruction distinction, and we mention six examples from experiments in which subjects studied and recalled lists of meaningfully-related items.…”

Collective memory: Collaborative and individual processes in remembering.

“…There is evidence that individual recall benefits from prior collaborative recall (e.g., Stephenson & Wagner, 1989;Yuker, 1955), but that work compares a single individual-recall trial with individual recall preceded by group discussion or group recall. Therefore, it does not enable one to distinguish between the effects of prior group recall and possible effects of hypermnesia, the increased recall that occurs when multiple recall trials follow in immediate succession (Erdelyi & Kleinbard, 1978;Payne, 1987). Our design disentangles these factors and also assesses the effect of prior individual recall on subsequent group recall.…”