Strategy Abandonment Effects in Cued Recall

Abstract

Decades of research have investigated the effects of encoding strategies in the formation of associations in memory. Despite this, it is not known whether or how changes in the use of strategies within a brief time span may affect memory. For example, what is the effect on memory of abandoning a recent strategy or switching to a different strategy? The present study systematically varied the strategies used by participants in two closely-spaced associative memory tasks. Results indicated that intentional abandonment of a verbal (sentence-generation) strategy had disproportionately negative consequences on memory for semantically unrelated word pairs. The findings suggest that memory encoding is affected by differences in strategy use across recent memory tasks, and have implications for effective use of memory strategies in practical settings. KEYWORDS: Cued Recall; Encoding Strategies; Inhibition