Effects of the number of study trials on single-item recognition following verbal discrimination learning

Abstract

Sixty subjects were exposed to one of four 20-item verbal discrimination lists for one, two, or four study trials. A recognition task followed consisting of the previous correct and incorrect items and a set of distractor words. The results of the analysis of the recognition task indicated superior discriminability of correct items as compared to incorrect items. The results also suggested that one criterion had been adopted which appeared to be lenient for correct items and stringent for incorrect items. The results were interpreted in terms of frequency theory.