Organization In Recall Research Articles

Discrete structural models of organization in free recall

A method is developed for expressing and testing organizational hypotheses which account for patterns of co-occurrence among to-be-recalled items. Each organizational hypothesis may be represented as a system of structural equations. A model defined by such a system reflects a hypothetical organization of the items into higher-order memory units or “chunks.” One set of model parameters characterizes the internal structure of each chunk. Another set characterizes the processing of each chunk as a molar unit. An iterative procedure is described for obtaining maximum likelihood estimates of model parameters and a test of the model's goodness of fit.

Organization and semantic elaboration in free recall.

Organization and semantic elaboration in free recall.

Articulatory organization in digit perception and recall

In two experiments, tape-recorded strings of seven recall digits were preceded by a redundant stimulus prefix containing either one or three digits. The prefix and recall digits (1) were articulatorily continuous, or (2)were made discontinuous by tape-splicing, or (3)were made discontinuous by deliberately spoken prosodic contour. Subjects were instructed to ignore the redundant prefixes and report only the recall digits. The main results were: (1)Compared to strings preceded by no prefix, all prefix conditions reduced recall. (2)Three-digit prefixes reduced recall less than one-digit prefixes. (3) In most cases, spliced prefixes reduced recall less than intact prefixes. Acoustic waveform measurements are presented to provide a partial account for the results.

Memory and intelligence: Age and ability differences in strategies and organization of recall

Proficiency at organizing information for recall is one aspect of memory functioning which could be expected to be related to intelligence, or general ability. Comparisons of children of average and of superior ability (Kuhlmann-Anderson scores) in a multitrial free-recall learning task confirmed this prediction: Both level of recall and amount of sequential organization were significantly higher for the superior ability groups. Mental age definitions of intelligence imply that equivalent performance by children of different chronological ages will be based on qualitatively similar cognitive processes. This assumption was not confirmed. Age-related changes in mnemonic strategies were not associated with ability-related differences in recall or organization. Some features of memory development are more dependent on age, whereas others are more dependent on ability. The latter may be best explained in terms of production inefficiency (Flavell, 1970).

Part-whole transfer and organization in children's and adults' multitrial free recall

The effect of age-related differnces in the use of recall organization on the amount of recall and the properties of recall-acquisition patterns obtained in a multitrial part-whole transfer task was investigated among subjects in grade levels 1, 4, 7, and college (ages 6.5, 9.6, 12.6, and 19.7 years, respectively). Half of the subjects receiving relevant and irrelevant part lists sorted stimuli before recall trials; other subjects studied the items as they were presented, one at a time. Relevant part list learning was equally facilitative for all age groups regardless of presentation condition, and despite the greater amounts of recall organization found among college subjects. All age groups showed trial-to-trial improvements in whole-list recall; however, only the college subjects showed corresponding improvements in clustering, and all age groups had high rates of fluctuation in the composition of their recall from trial to trial. It was concluded that while even the limited amounts of spontaneous recall organization found among children are sufficient to enhance recall, organization is not a necessary condition for recall improvement and not the primary means by which children throughout the preformal-operations period increase their recall of unrelated stimuli over trials in a free-recall task.

In search of the M-Gram: The structure of organization in free recall

This paper reviews three major classes of structural models of episodic and semantic memory which have been proposed to describe the organization of permanent memory. Although semantic memory workers have developed methods for obtaining representations of these models from empirical data, students of episodic memory generally have not. A method is presented for extracting representations of memory structure using output order information from a free recall learning task. It is shown that this method can be embedded within each of the three general models of memory structure to produce graphic representations of those structures. These representations may be obtained for individuals or for group data, and in some cases the nature and extent of individual differences in organizational structure can be characterized. A final section of the paper demonstrates the validity of the method using both real and simulated data, shows that the method is sensitive even to small differences in organizational structure, and illustrates the utility of this approach with an analysis of part-whole transfer.

Two-dimensional recall: Immediate identification of clusters in episodic and semantic memory

To show the organization of recall, items that are remembered together can be written on the same line of a two-dimensional (2D) grid. Such 2D recall does not induce the clustering it reveals. Two-dimensional recall on all trials is essentially the same as standard sequential free recall followed by unexpected 2D recall. The clustering in standard free recall is shown by identifying clusters that emerge in 2D recall. Clustering increases until most of recall is clustered. Two-dimensional recall shows that the number of clustered items increases more rapidly than the number of clusters, and that most of the increasing recall during learning is due to the increasing number of extra items recalled as part of a cluster.

Temporal Organization in Prose

Sixty high school students studied two, five-paragraph text passages in which the content was organized around either a semantic, temporal, or random theme. Half of the learners in each group were instructed to try to organize the material in some fashion which would aid them in remembering it on a later test. All students received free recall, semantically cued and temporally cued tests following reading. In free recall, both the semantic and temporal organization formats yielded superior performance compared to the random condition. For the cued tests, the most words were remembered when the mode of organization matched the type of test cue. There were no effects for the instructions to organize. These data indicate that what people remember from text is strongly influenced by both the structure of the content, and the type of test performance required.

Free recall and subjective organization in performance of learning disabled children.

16 learning disabled elementary school children were compared with 16 normally achieving classmates on a 12-item free-recall task administered over 12 learning trials. Learning disabled children were expected to exhibit deficit in recall and deficient organization of the material. A slight deficit in recall was noted with virtually identical scores on subjective organization. Results are inconsistent with previous research using categorical clustering as an index of organization.

The measurement of subjective organization in free recall.

The measurement of subjective organization in free recall.

The measurement of subjective organization in free recall.

The measurement of subjective organization in free recall.

Test anxiety, input modality, and levels of organization in free recall

Subjects performed for five trials on a free recall list containing both rhyming word pairs and word-associate pairs, with either visual or auditory presentation. High-anxiety subjects recalled and clustered less than low-anxiety subjects for both rhymes and associates. There was little effect due to input modality, nor did modality interact with anxiety.

Combined effect of goal organization and test expectations on organization in free recall following learning from text.

Combined effect of goal organization and test expectations on organization in free recall following learning from text.

Organization and semantic elaboration in free recall.

Organization and semantic elaboration in free recall.

Combined effect of goal organization and test expectations on organization in free recall following learning from text.

Combined effect of goal organization and test expectations on organization in free recall following learning from text.

Memory Span, Organization, and Transformations in Recall of Pictures and Words

Immediate memory span, category clustering, and reading comprehension scores accounted for approximately 60% of the variance in average free-recall performance across three trials given 30 high school Ss in special reading classes. Immediate memory span tended to correlate more highly with recall of words than pictures, while reading comprehension tended to correlate more highly with recall of pictures. Category clustering correlated only slightly more with recall of words than pictures. The findings were interpreted as supporting a model of recall in which pictorial stimuli are considered to afford a greater opportunity for simultaneous processing in an imaginal information-processing system.

Semantic processing and organization in free recall

It was hypothesized that both semantic processing and organizational activity are necessary for optimal free recall performance. In a series of three experiments, subjects were presented with a list of randomly selected nouns and were asked to make up a meaningful sentence for each noun. The subjects also rated the difficulty of using each noun. The subjects were instructed to try to remember words that were labeled "remember" words. For words that were labeled "story" words, the subjects were instructed only to make each sentence, using the word, part of an ongoing story which each subject was to make up. A test of retention for all presented words, using retention intervals of both 1 min and 24 h, showed that the story words were always recalled better than were the remember words. However, the amount of sequential organization was the same for both the story and the remember words. Recognition performance was found to be the same for both types of words. In addition, the story words were rated as being more difficult than the remember words. It was concluded that extensive semantic processing without organization is not sufficient for optimal recall.

CLUSTER: A program for identifying recurrent clusters

A new way of analyzing organization in free recall (and other sequences) was recently proposed by Buschke (l976), who showed the clustering in free recall by identifying recurrent clusters of items that were recalled together and were demarcated by different items or clusters on different recall attempts. CLUSTER is a new program for analyzing sequential organization by fmding recurrent groups and subgroups of items that occur together (regardless of order), delineating the specific clusters on each trial to show the development of organization and provide a basis for measuring organization in terms of such clustering. . Description. CLUSTER is an extension ofPellegrino's (l972) program for analyzing subjective organization from one trial to the next, extending Pellegrino's program search for recurrent clusters on any trial by comparing all sequences of items on every trial with those in all subsequent trials. Larger groups are broken up into component subgroups by comparing groupings in Trial I with those in Trials 2, 3 N, groupings in Trial 2 with those in Trials 3, 4 N, and so on until the smallest clusters have been identified. A cluster is identified as a group of items that are recalled together in any order on two or more trials and are demarcated by different items or clusters on different trials. Identifying clusters that recur on any trials shows the recurrence of clusters on more than just the next trial, so that the development and persistence of organization during learning can be analyzed in terms of the basic clustering and higher order organization of clusters. While the main purpose of Pellegrino's (1972) program was to compute the amount of subjective organization in free recall learning (Pellegrino, 1971) without delineating specific clusters, o~r aim is to analyze the actual clustering on all trials, so that the nature of the

Grouped Presentation in Free Recall

The subjects with word groupings of constant size on study trials or with singleitem presentation over trials recalled as much as the subjects with increasingly larger groupings each trial. Progressively smaller groupings over trials led to less recall than all other conditions in one experiment, but not in two others. Organization of recall was generally equivalent within the grouped-presentation conditions and generally greater than that in the single-item condition. The manner of grouped presentation seemed less critical than the fact of grouped presentation per se. The present paper is concerned with the effect of the grouped presentation of items in multitrial free recall. Bower, Lesgold, and Tieman (1969) reported several experiments in which they presented several words at a time in order to acquire some control over the way the subjects organized the list for recall. Their first experiment compared subjects who had the same groupings over trials with subjects who had the composition of their groupings mixed over trials. It was found that subjects given disrupted groupings performed worse than subjects given the same words in each grouping over trials, and Bower et al. presented other evidence to show that this method of presentation indeed influenced the subjects' performance. We were concerned especially with that report's Experiment IV, which was intended to test the assumption that recall increases over trials partly because the subject's organizational units increase in size and integrity over trials (see Mandler, 1967; Tulving, 1968). In other words, the subject recalls a greater number of words because he incorporates more and more words into each of a fixed number of organizational units. That experiment used a variation of the method of grouped presentation, with the subjects under one condition given groupings of 3 words each on trial 1, 6 words each on trial 2, and then 12 words each on trial 3, and the subjects under the other condition given groupings of 12 words each on trial 1, 6 words each on trial 2, and then 3 words per grouping on trial 3. The argument was that if subjects normally increase the size of their organizational units over trials, and if grouped presentation deter

The Effects of Attention and Repetition on the Organization of Recall of Randomly Arranged Associates

Summary A list of 60 randomized nouns, made up of 15 each of four mutually exclusive categories, was presented to 72 subjects for learning under various conditions. The subjects were divided into 3 × 3 groups, according to (a) the variable of attention and (b) the variable of repetition. The results indicate that repetition alone did not have any significant effect on the organization of recall of the stimulus material; it was effective only as a factor interacting with attention. Attention, on the other hand, had a significant effect on organization. Moreover, subjects did not necessarily use the basis of organization designed for them by the experimenter.