Cued recall and free recall as a function of the number of items per cue

Abstract

This research was designed to determine whether a cue for retrieval is limited or unlimited in terms of the number of discrete stimulus items for which it can act during memorization. Several lists of words were constructed so that each list could be divided into groups of equal numbers of words beginning with the same letter. The number of items per initial-letter cue varied from list to list, over a range from 1 to 12. When S s were provided with the initial-letter cues during each recall period, cued-recall memorization varied inversely with the number of words in a category. The larger the category size, the poorer was cued-recall performance. Under conditions of free recall where no aids were provided, memorization did not vary as a function of the distribution of initial letters in the stimulus list. Free-recall performance was similar to cued-recall performance when there were 6 or 8 items per cue; free-recall performance was superior to cued-recall performance when there were 12 items per cue. It was suggested that the efficiency of a cue for retrieval is dependent upon the number of items for which it must act, and that an efficient strategy for remembering must be some compromise between the number of cues used and the number of items assigned to each cue.