Noncued Recall Research Articles

Evaluating recall of key safety messages, and attitudes and perceptions of a patient safety initiative at a pediatric hospital

Involving inpatients in their safety and well-being is becoming increasingly common. Interventions have been developed to encourage patients to be active in their own safety, but published evaluations are scarce. The Patient Safety Ambassador (PSA) program was developed to increase patient and parent/guardian engagement and knowledge in patient safety. This study aimed to determine recall ability of key safety messages and explore attitudes and perceptions towards the PSA program, hence obtaining feedback for program improvements. Participants were pediatric inpatients and parents of inpatients. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted. Cued and non-cued recall ability was determined using questions with and without specific cues, while attitudes and perceptions were explored using openended questions regarding patient safety. QSR NVivo 10 software was used to analyze interviews for recall ability and major themes. 95% of parents could remember all safety messages with cues, but could only remember one (35%) or two (32.5%) messages without cues. Inpatient participants could remember up to 4 messages with cues, no messages without cues, and, unlike parents, were unable to discuss their attitudes and perceptions towards safety. Five major themes emerged from analysis of interviews with parents: the importance of medication knowledge, parental involvement in care, having trust in healthcare team, asking questions, and advocacy. Use of cues appears beneficial in facilitating recall of safety messages. Parents had varied attitudes and perceptions to safety. Future research can explore methods to engage pediatric inpatients, integrate cues to increase recall, and examine resulting behavioural changes.

A biopsychosocial investigation of changes in self-concept on the Head Injury Semantic Differential Scale

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to investigate the influence of the “good-old-days” bias, neuropsychological functioning and cued recall of life events on self-concept change. Forty seven adults with TBI (70% male, 1–5 years post-injury) and 47 matched controls rated their past and present self-concept on the Head Injury Semantic Differential Scale (HISD) III. TBI participants also completed a battery of neuropsychological tests. The matched control group of 47 were from a sample of 78 uninjured participants who were randomised to complete either the Social Readjustment Rating Scale—Revised (cued recall) or HISD (non-cued recall) first. Consistent with the good-old-days bias, participants with TBI rated their pre-injury self-concept as more positive than their present self-concept and the present self-concept of controls (p < .05). More positive pre-injury self-concept ratings were related to lower estimated premorbid IQ and poorer verbal fluency and delayed memory (p < .05). For uninjured participants, cued recall, life events and event appraisals each accounted for unique variance in self-concept change (p < .01) after controlling for negative affect. The cued recall group rated their past self-concept as significantly more negative than the non-cued group (p < .01). Overall, the good-old-days bias, neuropsychological functioning and cued recall influenced reports of self-concept change by affecting retrospective ratings of past self-concept. Further research is needed to investigate the impact of contextual cues on self-concept change after TBI.

The effects of teaching notetaking strategies on elementary students’ science learning

The research examined effects of notetaking instruction on elementary-aged students’ abilities to recall science information and their notetaking behaviors. Classes of eight to nine years old third grade students were randomly assigned to three treatment conditions: strategic notetaking, partial strategic notetaking, and control, for four training sessions. The effects of the notetaking instruction were measured by their performances on a test about science information, a long-term free recall of the information, and the number of information units recalled with or without cues. Students’ prior science achievement was used to group students into two levels (high vs. low) and functioned as another independent variable in analysis. Results indicated significant treatment effect in favor of the strategy notetaking instruction groups on cued and non-cued recall of the information units. Students with higher prior achievement in science performed better on cued recall and long-term free recall of information. The results suggest that students as young as those in third grade classes can be instructed to develop notetaking ability that promotes their learning.

Cued serial recall

Three studies introduced cuing in a serial recall task by providing some items of a list being tested on the test sheet. Results indicated both enhancement and decrement of item recall for cued vs. noncued recall as a function of the serial positions of the items used as cues. Data are interpreted as inconsistent with position learning hypotheses, mildly supportive of item-item relationship hypotheses, and most consistent with the Estes (1972) model of serial learning.

Imagery and associative memory in children

Second and sixth graders, ages 7–8 and 11–12, respectively, were presented with lists of pairs of nouns. They were asked to represent each pair in memory as a single interactive image, as two separate images, or by a control procedure. After presentation of the pairs, the children were tested either by cued or noncued recall. The difference between the interaction condition and the other conditions appeared in recall measures which reflect pairwise organization in memory (cued recall, pair recall, conditional recall probabilities, and χ 2) to a much greater extent than in measures of individual item recall. The results were interpreted as supporting an imagery-organization hypothesis.

Storage and Retrieval of Verbal Information under Various Cueing Conditions in a Multitrial Experiment

A multitrial experiment examined the availability-accessibility hypothesis concerning recall for meaningful words. Ten subjects were assigned to one of four cueing conditions: cued learning, cued recall; cued learning, noncued recall; noncued learning, cued recall; and noncued learning, noncued recall. The stimuli were 40 meaningful words, each from a different category of either high or low taxonomic frequency. Trial 1 recall demonstrated that cued recall was significantly more effective than noncued recall and high taxonomic frequency words were more frequently recalled than low taxonomic frequency words. A trend analysis of the six trials showed similar results.

Cue-dependent effects in recall of categorized lists

Noncued and cued recall of categorized lists are similar in a number of ways: They show the same rate of gain in item recall with increasing category size; they both produce serial position effects within categories; and they both show a "some-or-none" pattern of with-category recall frequency. Cued and noncued recall differ in other respects: There is a great improvement in item and in category recall attendant on the provision of cues, and only noncued recall displays a list position effect. The points of similarity are taken to indicate that both cued and noncued recall measure the same underlying processes. The points of differences suggest the utility of cueing procedures in identifying the origin of characteristics of recall, according to the principle that any feature of noncued recall that is altered by provision of cues must originate in the retrieval process; features resistant to such modification represent encoding or storage effects.

Imagery and long-term retention

Long-term retention of high- and low-imagery nouns was assessed in incremental free recall, paired-associates learning, and cued and noncued recall of noun pairs. In each case imagery had a clear positive effect on long-term retention, and the effect could not be explained by differential acquisition of the material. Results of the experiments were also examined by analyzing subjective organization, and by comparing cued and noncued recall. Such results were interpreted as supporting an imagery-organization hypothesis which asserts that images aroused by discrete verbal items can be combined into complex, integrated images, the components of which provide effective cues for retrieving or redintegrating the remainder of the unit.

Effects of three types of repetition on cued and noncued recall of words

Three list-item memory experiments explored the effects of three types of repetition of a basic unit consisting of two words in an explicitly designated conceptual category. The types were repetition of the complete basic unit, repetition of the category name with two new instances, and repetition of the category name only. All types of repetition showed a large facilitative effect on recall of the basic unit. The effect was considerably larger when repetitions were spaced rather than massed, and it manifested itself mainly in enhanced accessibility of higher-order units (categories) rather than access to elements within these units (words within accessible categories). The results as a whole suggest that the structure of the higher-order memory units is hierarchical, with access to the unit possible only through its control element.

La rétention à long terme : organisation et recherche dans la mémoire des formes

Summary A set of sixteen forms was derived from four basic abstract figures (four instances per basic figure). Subjects were given seven trials to learn the sixteen forms in a free recall situation. After a one-week delay, they were submitted to two retention tests. During learning trials, subjects were divided into two groups : in group 1, the four basic forms were presented simultaneously with the derived forms ; in group 2, subjects never saw the basic forms. Results show that the presentation of basic forms facilitates the development of a categorization process ; however one third of the subjects in group 2 reached a high degree of categorization. Learning seems dependent on this categorization process. The retention tests were the same for ail subjects : first a non-cued recall (Rni), then a cued recall (Ri) in which the cues were the four basic forms. In Rni, the retention rate was identical for both learning conditions (58,%). In Ri, the cues increased the recall. The analysis of data shows that long term retention depends on two factors : the development of a categorization process during learning and the use of retrieval cues.

Negative effects of recency in recall and recognition

Following the immediate probe recall of each of 40 five-pair lists, S s were retested for retention of previously tested and previously untested pairs by cued recall, noncued recall, or recognition tests of either stimulus or response items. Negative effects of recency were obtained in all conditions: items in the final input position of the originally presented lists were recalled and recognized at significantly lower levels than were items from earlier input positions. Neither the individual items in a pair or any long-term association or unitized form of the items seemed to have been well registered in memory at the time they were presented.

Availability versus accessibility of information in memory for words

The S s learned, on a single trial, lists of words belonging to explicitly designated conceptual categories. Lists varied in terms of length (12, 24, and 48 words) and number of words per category (1, 2, and 4). Immediate recall was tested either in presence or absence of category names as retrieval cues. Cued recall was higher than noncued recall, the difference varying directly with list length and inversely with number of items per category. This finding was interpreted as indicating that sufficiently intact memory traces of many words not recalled under the noncued recall conditions were available in the memory storage, but not accessible for retrieval. Further analysis of the data in terms of recall of categories and recall of words within recalled categories suggested two independent retrieval processes, one concerned with the accessibility of higher-order memory units, the other with accessibility of items within higher-order units.