Very long‐term recall and recognition of well‐learned material

Abstract

Three experiments examined very long-term verbatim memory (from 4 months to 28 years) for lengthy, complex material. Experiments 1 and 2 found that recall (12 and 20 months after the material was last accessed) was at or near ceiling for many participants, and was significantly higher than free-choice recognition, with recognition failure for recallable words (RF) being observed. The magnitude of the effect corresponded to that predicted by the Tulving-Wiseman (1975) function. Experiment 3 found that recall was at or near ceiling for 3 years, then declined dramatically as the retention interval increased. However, given equal amounts of context as retrieval cues, forcedchoice recognition remained relatively strong for as long as 28 years. These findings provide evidence of long-term memory for exact details of complex discourse far in excess of previous demonstrations, and, under certain circumstances, extend the RF phenomenon to lengthy, welllearned texts over long retention intervals.

Posterior distribution analysis of the retention of briefly studied words

“…Bahrick's (1984) seminal data showed that people accurately recognize Spanish language word definitions learned at high-school up to 50 years later. Similar performance has been found for street names from childhood suburbs (Squire, 1989), television programs (Schmidt, Peck, Paas & van Breukelen, 2000) and Shakespearean scripts (Noice & Noice, 2002). A characteristic of all these studies is a forgetting curve that becomes flat after some period of time and remains flat at above chance levels up to the longest tested retention interval.…”

Backwards and forwards in space and time: Recalling dance movement from long-term memory

“…Music, with its inherent sequential and temporal order, is a provocative and effective structural feature of the dance environment; verbal labels serve as cues for some participants and are used to communicate and reconstruct material in the studio. As Noice and Noice (2002) note, contextual associates -visual, spatial, emotional, olfactory -accompany recall. Imagery in this ecologically valid dance studio setting is similar to that observed under laboratory conditions by Overby (1990) and Smith (1990) -imagery is not only visual and verbal but also kinaesthetic and auditory.…”

“…According to Ginsborg and Chaffin (2007) memory for melody is more reliable than for words, but both are likely to be forgotten together. For actors, motoric cues are associated with the recall of text (Noice and Noice, 1997) with text recall approaching a ceiling over the first three years and then declining as retention intervals increase; contextual cues significantly aid retrieval (Noice and Noice, 2002). Spatial and visual contextual cues also play a limited role in actors' recall of a play (Schmidt, Boshuizen, and van Breukelen, 2002).…”

Validity of Adults’ Retrospective Memory for Early Television Viewing

“…Although limited in number, several empirical studies suggest that some memories, especially those formed from repeated and deeply processed experiences, can be recalled decades later with surprising accuracy even with little rehearsal in the intervening years. Information recalled in these studies includes Downloaded by [New York University] at 05:25 10 October 2014 geographic locations from childhood neighborhoods (Schmidt, Peeck, & Paas, 2000), names of high school classmates (Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975) or former students (Huang, 1997), foreign languages learned in school (Bahrick, 1984), memorized theatrical dialogue (Noice & Noice, 2002), and identification of remote one-season TV programs (Bradley, Payne, & Angelini, 2010;Squire, 1989). Some of these studies of procedural knowledge, such as mathematics or foreign languages, find a pattern of forgetting in the first few years after learning and then a period of stability in which little further forgetting occurs across many years; as much as 60% of material is retained (Bahrick et al, 1975).…”