An Examination of Some Aspects of Knowledge-Assembly Theory

Abstract

The present series of experiments examined the effects of the context of to-be-learned material on retention in light of the simultaneous activation formulation of knowledge-assembly theory. Experiment 1 manipulated the context of simple, declarative sentences through the use of cue words while controlling for words shared between sentence idea units and time of activation of idea units. Results indicated that context significantly influenced idea unit recall. Experiment 2 manipulated the context cues of pairs of sentences containing direct correspondence of content and found contextual cues to be powerful influences on recall of information. Experiment 3 controlled context and contrasted subjects’ recall of sentence pairs with and without direct correspondence and found no significant differences on any measure. Experiment 4 examined the effects of recency of activation on recall of idea units and found, in addition to a significantly greater amount of recall of meaningful context idea units, that as time between sentence idea units and cue words increased, so did recall. Experiment 5 examined recency of activation in sentence pairs containing direct correspondence of content. The results indicated that when distractor tasks were employed during the time interval between the presentation of the sentences in pairs, no significant differences were observed in recall associated with differing intervals of time between presentation of the sentences in pairs. Experiment 6 examined the effects of context on retention within paragraph structures, and results showed that context influenced recall.