The role of retrieval during study: Evidence of reminding from overt rehearsal

Abstract

Abstract Reminding occurs when a stimulus being studied elicits a spontaneous retrieval of a previously-studied stimulus, an event that is more likely to occur when the two stimuli are related in some way. One consequence of reminding is enhanced recall for a word when followed by a related word later in the study list (i.e., the reminding effect; Tullis, Benjamin, & Ross, 2014). However, it is difficult to precisely localize this enhancement to reminding that occurs during study. The present research uses a “think-aloud” protocol and uses measures of overt rehearsal as a direct index of reminding during encoding, with the goal of relating these measures to the more distant consequences of reminding at test. In two experiments, participants were presented pairs of related and unrelated words that were separated by various lags and instructed to rehearse out loud anything that came to mind during study. The study phase was followed by a recognition test in Experiment 1 and a cued recall test in Experiment 2. In both experiments, prior related words were more likely to be spontaneously rehearsed during the interval following a related word. In Experiment 2, this pattern of rehearsals was shown to be predictive of later memory, strongly implying a link between the action of reminding at study and memory enhancement at test. Overt rehearsal partially mediated the benefit to memory engendered by semantic associations across items, indicating that reminding is an important route by which semantics exert an effect on episodic memory.