Optimizing cue effectiveness: Recall of 500 and 600 incidentally learned words.

Abstract

In three cued recall experiments, prerequisites to optimal memory performance of large amounts of verbal materials were examined. Practically perfect recall of 500 and 600 words was obtained when effective retrieval cues were provided at test. The method used to demonstrate this was to instruct the subjects to define their own retrieval cues by generating properties or features to each word presented. At an unexpected recall test, these self-generated properties were presented as cues, and the subjects were instructed to recall the previously presented items. Cue effectiveness was manipulated by varying amount of retrieval information, type of cues, and retention interval. Distinctiveness and compatibility of retrieval cues are proposed as two necessary prerequisites to perfect recall performance. The well-known studies of Shepard (1967), Standing (1973), and Standing, Conezio, and Haber (1970) have shown extremely high recognition-memory performances of large amounts of pictorial information. Shepard (1967) presented subjects with 600 pictures for a few seconds each and then asked them which member of the various test pairs had been among the 600 items. More than 95% of the pictures presented previously were correctly recognized. At the time of publication, this result was found surprising by memory researchers, who were attuned to the rather meager ability of humans to remember nonmeaningful material such as nonsense syllables and isolated digits (Loftus, 1982). Although these studies are spectacular, it should, however, be pointed out that good memory performance per se is not an exceptional phenomenon in the memory literature. Mnemonic devices have been known to western culture for thousands of years (Yates, 1966), and several experiments have demonstrated that the capacity of human memory can be increased by using specific mnemonic systems (see, e.g., Bellezza, 1981) or some