Abstract
Ironically, the presentation of a subset of studied material as retrieval cues at test often impairs recall of the remaining (target) material—an effect known as part-list cuing impairment. Part-list cues are typically provided at the beginning of the recall period, a time when nearly all individuals would be able to recall at least some studied items on their own. Across two experiments, we examined the effects of part-list cuing when student participants could decide on their own when the cues were presented during the recall period. Results showed that participants activated the cues relatively late in the recall period, when recall was already close to asymptote. Critically, such delayed cuing no longer impaired recall performance. The detrimental effect of part-list cuing, as it has been demonstrated numerous times in the memory literature, thus seems to depend on presentating the cue items (too) early in the recall period.
Highlights
Both laboratory and applied memory research has demonstrated that episodic remembering can benefit enormously from the presence of adequate retrieval cues
Follow-up comparisons revealed that standard part-list cuing impaired target recall relative to the nopart-list cuing condition, t (94) = 2.91, p = .005, d = 0.59, whereas
Most participants in the self-paced part-list cuing condition did not activate the part-list cues early in the recall period, which contrasts with the standard part-list cuing condition, in which the cue items were provided at the beginning of the recall period
Summary
Both laboratory and applied memory research has demonstrated that episodic remembering can benefit enormously from the presence of adequate retrieval cues. Recall of a categorized list can be improved if the items’ category names are provided as retrieval cues at test (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966); recall can benefit when an individual’s environment or mood during test matches the individual’s environment and mood during study (Godden & Baddeley, 1975; Teasdale & Fogarty, 1979); and recall of autobiographical events can benefit if the individual is told what the event was or where and when it happened (Wagenaar, 1986). The three mechanisms are nonexclusive and different mechanisms may mediate part-list cuing impairment in different encoding situations (e.g., (Aslan & Bauml, 2007; Bauml & Aslan, 2006))
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