Effects of Semantic and Nonsemantic Orienting Tasks on the Free Recall of Words

Abstract

Summary Three studies of male and female undergraduates examined the effects of incidental orienting tasks on the free recall of concrete nouns. In Experiments 1 (between-Ss design N = 53) and 2 (within-Ss design N = 54) semantic orienting tasks resulted in recall that was equal to or higher than recall following intentional learning. Nonsemantic orienting tasks produced poorest recall. In Experiment 3 (N = 59), Ss performed a word recognition task between two free-recall trials. The target and distractor words were either acoustically, orthographically, or semantically related or were unrelated to each other. On the second free-recall trial, recall was highest for target words that had been paired with semantically related distractors. The results of the three experiments add to the growing support for a levels-of-processing model of memory.