To-be-remembered Items Research Articles

Retrieval of pictures and words from long-term memory: Effects upon short-term memory

On each of a series of Brown-Peterson short-term memory (STM) tests, the presentation of a verbal to-be-remembered (TBR) item (a five-letter quintogram in Experiment 1 and an eight-letter octogram in Experiment 2) was followed immediately by a 10-sec retention interval. During the retention interval, subjects recalled and reproduced previously learned paired associate response triads that consisted of three concrete pictures, concrete words, abstract pictures, or abstract words. Following selective retrieval of one of the four types of response triads from long-term memory (LTM), subjects attempted to recall the TBR items from STM. In both experiments, the intervening retrieval of abstract words resulted in significantly poorer retention of the TBR items than did the intervening retrieval of concrete words; the retrieval of concrete words resulted, in turn, in significantly poorer retention of the TBR items than did the retrieval of concrete or abstract pictures. Retrieval of the latter two types of materials appeared not to interfere with the short-term retention of the TBR verbal material (i.e., the quintograms and octograms). The results reflect the occurrence of selective interference effects, and, except for one discrepant finding, appear to be consistent with Paivio’s 11971) dual-coding hypothesis and Shiffrin and Schneider’s (1977) general theory of memory.

The Basis and Implications of the Restoration of a Recency Effect in Immediate Serial Recall

When a spoken presentation of a supra-span sequence of to-be-remembered (TBR) items is followed immediately by a similarly-spoken non-TBR item (stimulus suffix) the typical salience of the terminal item in recall is almost destroyed. However, Salter (1975) observed restoration of salience when pre-terminal and terminal TBR items differed in category membership. Five experiments are reported which aimed to clarify the basis and locus of Salter's effect. Survival of salience for the heterogeneous item was found under the following conditions: with the occurrence of the item unpredictable from trial-to-trial (Experiment I); with enforced processing of the suffix (Experiment II); with performance of a secondary task during list presentation (Experiment III); with the requirement to retain both the location and identity of the item (Experiment IV); and with the item as the terminal member of a non-suffixed visual list (Experiment V). It is argued that the effect has a postcategorical locus, and that its origin is not in better registration (mediated by selective attention), but, rather, in the enhancement of retrieval (mediated by access to distinctive information encoded during presentation). It is suggested that the latter hypothesis may have wide application in accounting for many kinds of salience.

Constituent processes in the differentiation of items in memory.

Three experiments were designed to clarify the perplexing ability of subjects to discriminate between to-be-remembered (TBR) and to-be-forgotten (TBF) items in memory. After the presentation of each pair of words in a list, subjects were first required to solve one to four arithmetic problems and were then cued whether to remember or forget that pair. When subjects were free to use a remember (R) or forget (F) cue in any way they saw fit, their subsequent ability to differentiate TBR and TBF items was impressive, but when subjects were required to retrieve both TBR and TBF word pairs in response to an R or F cue, respectively, their subsequent ability to differentiate TBR and TBF items deteriorated. The results implicate within-list retrieval of TBR items as a potent tagging or strengthening operation that provides a basis on which those items may later be discriminated from TBF items. The potency of such events, in terms of their influence on later recall, depends in a clear-cut way on the depth (i.e., delay) of retrieval involved, but there are no such comparable effects on later recognition.