Unaided Recall Research Articles

Audio recall immediately following video change in television news

This study examines (1) whether the appearance of graphics and other visuals in a television newscast would result in lower recall of audio content, (2) whether such visuals would promote comprehension of each story as a whole, and (3) whether subjects would prefer stories with visuals. Subjects watched a simulated newscast containing 12 stories, half enhanced by news visuals and half showing the newscaster only. Results indicated that short‐term recall of audio was less during graphics and that unaided recall of story topics was greater for stories with visuals. Subjects preferred stories with visuals and showed greater comprehension of them.

The effect of plain packages on the perception of cigarette health warnings.

A survey was conducted with 568 adolescent children (average age 13) to investigate the possible effects upon perceptions of health warnings when cigarettes are presented in plain packaging. A measure of unaided recall was used to reflect participants' attention to the assortment of cues presented on cigarette packs. The presentation of health warnings in the context of plain packs achieved a significantly greater recall rate as opposed to brand packs. When less brand image cues were presented, respondents were able to perceive and recall with more accuracy a greater proportion of 'non-image' information.

Retrieving texts from an external store: the effects of an explanatory context and of semantic fit between text and address

External-information storage may reduce the load on human memory. But if information is preserved in an external store the task of retrieving information from that store puts new demands on memory. This creates a trade-off between internal and external storage. One of the prerequisites for external retrieval is learning an address. In this study, the trade-off between internal and external retrieval is exemplified by contrasting the memorization of written texts with the memorization of addresses under which these texts are stored in a computer file. In Experiment 1 Ss were tested for the retention of addresses. In Experiment 2 they were tested for the retention of texts, but had the choice between memorizing the texts and memorizing an address under which the texts were available. Independent variables were the availability of an explanatory context, and the semantic fit between address and text. An explanatory context improved address learning in Experiment 1 and unaided recall in Experiment 2. It did not influence the utilization of addresses as tested in Experiment 2. The semantic fit between address and text had a considerable impact on both the learning and the utilization of addresses. Whereas some subjects were assigned standard addresses, others generated their own addresses. Self-generated addresses had effects similar to standard addresses selected for high semantic fit. It is suggested that learning an external address involves an internal representation of the material stored under that address.

Recognition versus Recall as Measures of Television Commercial Forgetting

The authors report the second in a series of experiments on recognition as a dependent variable in the study of learning and forgetting of television commercials. They investigate the impact of time since exposure, commercial length, and commercial repetition on recognition and unaided recall scores. The results indicate that recognition scores are not indiscriminately high, as commonly is argued, and that they do decline with time, contrary to what often is assumed. The data, in fact, show that recognition scores are more sensitive and more discriminating than, and covary with, unaided recall scores. The evidence indicates they warrant more consideration by advertisers.

Retrograde amnesia in patients with Alzheimer's disease or Huntington's disease

Retrograde amnesia (RA) was studied in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) or Alzheimer's disease (AD) using an updated version of the remote memory battery originally developed by Albert, Butters and Levin. Regardless of whether remote memory was measured by unaided recall or cued recall, HD patients exhibited deficits that were equally severe across decades. RA was more severe in AD than in HD patients and the AD patients recalled significantly more items from the 1940s and 50s than from the 60s, 70s or 80s. The AD patients also displayed dysnomia, while the HD patients did not. Naming difficulties appeared to contribute to the poor overall performance of the AD patients, but did not account for the temporal gradient of their RA. These findings, like recent reports focusing on these patients' ability to learn new information and to search semantic memory, indicate that the processes underlying AD and HD patients' memory failures are distinct.

Factors affecting the recall and comprehension of television news

SUMMARY Current research indicates that in developed and developing countries television is perceived as not only having the highest credibility as a source of news, but also providing more information than any other medium. In South Africa debate over the content of news broadcasts continues unabated, but there is a paucity of research that investigates the actual impact, in terms of comprehension and recall, that television news has upon viewers in this country. This study employs both verbal and physiological measures to assess unaided recall of an SABC-TV television news broadcast by 57 black university students. Media preferences, perceptions of media as sources of news, and perceptions of media credibility are also investigated. This article is based on a paper presented at the XVth Conference of the International Association for Mass Communication Research: COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY, DEVELOPMENT AND THE THIRD WORLD, held in New Delhi, August, 1986.

Salience Effects in Brand Recall

The effects of brand salience on brand recall were investigated in five experiments, each involving a different product category. The authors demonstrate that increasing the salience of a single brand can significantly impair unaided recall of competing brands. The effect was observable even in the early stages of the recall process.

Reliability of Two Survey Techniques: A Study of Innovation Discovery by Farmers

A series of bounded unaided recall surveys (the diary phase) followed by an unbounded aided recall survey were conducted in 1983 to study the discovery of innovations by 55 South Australian farmers. The discovery dates which were reported in the diary phase were cross-checked as being highly precise, but the subsequent aided recall interview revealed that most of the discoveries made during the diary phase had not been reported. About half of all discovery dates reported during the final aided recall interview as having occurred while the diary phase as in progress, could be cross- checked within 2 months of the reported date. An accuracy code for discovery dates subjectively assigned by the interviewers was found to be largely in accordance with the results of the data cross- checking process.

Dietary recall method comparison for hospitalized elderly subjects

A study was made to compare accuracy of the 24-hour recall, including both number of items recalled and amounts of food eaten, for elderly subjects using three methods: I, unaided oral recall, II, printed questionnaire, and III, interview with actual-size color pictures of foods. Sixty hospitalized patients, age 65 to 94, were interviewed. Factors studied for influence on scores were age, sex, educational level, obesity, place of residence, and food preparer. Results showed no significant difference in scores owing to method used, except that 30 subjects above the median age of 76 scored higher on number of items recalled and amounts of food eaten when using the printed questionnaire. None of the demographic factors studied made a significant difference in scores.

Reducing the Costs of TV Commercials by Use of Time Compressions

The amount of time needed to broadcast a television commercial can be reduced by means of an electronic process called time compression. A 30-second commercial can be broadcast in 24 seconds by this process. No shift occurs in voice pitch and subjects are not aware that commercials have been altered. Recall scores are substantially higher for time compressed commercials than for their normal speed counterparts. There is a 36% increase in unaided recall scores and a 40% increase in aided recall scores.

Long-term memory for a common object

A series of experiments was done to determine how completely and accurately people remember the visual details of a common object, a United States penny. People were asked to: draw a penny from unaided recall; draw a penny given a list of its visual features; choose from among a list of possible features those which do appear on a penny; indicate what was wrong with an erroneous drawing of a penny; and select the correct representation of a penny from among a set of incorrect drawings. Performance was surprisingly poor on all tasks. On balance, the results were consistent with the idea that the visual details of an object, even a very familiar object, are typically available from memory only to the extent that they are useful in everyday life. It was also suggested that recognition tasks may make much smaller demands on memory than is commonly assumed.

Familiarity and difficulty of author-title materials for use in studies of long-term memory

Familiarity ratings were collected for 48 relatively well-known authors and for three representative titles by each author. Relative difficulty was determined by asking subjects to write an author’s surname, given the set of three titles; independent groups were tested for unaided recall, for recall cued by the author’s first and middle name, or for recognition. Correlations indicated that mean familiarity does predict difficulty scores. Overall recall levels were low, but were markedly improved by cuing or recognition testing. Thus, these materials should be useful in attempts to experimentally enhance retrieval from long-term memory.

Literacy, Illiteracy, and Learning From Television News

This paper reports on an investigation of the abilities of literates and adult nonreaders to recall and use information from a national network television news program. On a test of unaided recall of news stories the literates recalled 55% more stories than the nonreaders. On a multiple-choice test of information gain from the news program, the literates performed 63% better than the nonreaders. The samples were found to be virtually identical in their use of and opinions about television news. A control group of college students was given the information test without first seeing the news program and did no better than chance. The most important factor affecting recall was the length of time the story was on the air. Human interest stories were recalled much better by both groups than any other type of story. The level of performance among the adult nonreaders correlated highly with their reading levels.

What Makes a Brand Name Familiar?

This article reports a study of unaided brand recall by female household heads and examines some factors related to brand salience. Findings indicate that brand recall is a complex, dynamic process.

Retrieval of sentence relations: Semantic vs. syntactic deep structure

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context are reported. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and recipient coincided with the syntactic function of deep subject and object, respectively, was better than for sentences which did not have this normal semantic-syntactic coincidence. Unaided recall was not different for the two types of sentences. Models of sentence processing may have to represent both types of information as available to the language user.

Personality and sexual adjustment.

In view of the considerable importance attached to sexual adjustment by many psychologists and psychiatrists, it is disappointing that very little work seems in fact to have been done in this field. There are, it is true, surveys of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, such as those associated with Kinsey, but these are characterized on the whole by the serious limitation of using entirely descriptive statistics; these are useful in a limited sense, but are not very informative. The value of a mean of 2 · 34 for the number of times that members of a given sample indulge in intercourse during the week is doubtful when it is realized that some members of the sample have intercourse once or twice a year, while others have it several times a night; even if one could take the unaided recall of such events very seriously, and even if the rate for a given person were less fluctuating than it probably is, nevertheless when variances are as large as these means have little meaning or relevance. Clearly the important question centres on quite a different problem, namely that of personality traits and other factors giving rise to these very marked individual differences in sexual behaviour and adjustment. Kinsey and his followers have concentrated on the factors of social class and age, perhaps because these are relatively easy to ascertain; it is not so easy to ascertain the psychological factors involved, as many critics of Kinsey's work have pointed out. Nor have psychiatrists, in spite of their professional interest in this field, been more forthcoming; apart from isolated statements about the lower fertility of psychotics, the loss of libido in depression, its excess in manic states, and the widespread sexual troubles of neurotics, little serious and detailed work appears to have been done to relate personality traits, or even descriptive diagnostic labels, to specific types of sexual behaviour. Psychologists have been equally remiss; apart from a few undistinguished and not very meaningful studies reviewed by the writer (Eysenck, 1971) little use has been made of the well-established research methodologies and psychometric tests available to them for use in such a situation.

Restricted associates as cues in free recall

Subjects were given a single study trial on a list of 30 nouns with a descriptive adjective adjacent to each noun (NA list) with instructions to remember the noun. AN lists as well as control lists (A only and N only) were also used. Following unaided recall the appropriate list of cue words (A for N; N for A) was given to stimulate additional recall. Cues were quite ineffective unless they occurred on the study trial adjacent to the word to be remembered. A true cueing effect was found for the NA and AN lists indicating that the memory for the target word included its associated noun or adjective.

The Oral Reading Performance of a Second Grade Class Using an Informal Reading Test

THE USE OF the informal reading inventory has been recommended as a clinical diagnostic proce dure and as a regular classroom teaching technique (1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 16). Socher (12) reported that a study using an informal reading inventory with upper elementary school children is currently being con ducted at Temple University. No r e s e arch during the period 1930-1959 using the informal reading in ventory as here proposed could be found by the au thor in the professional literature (13, 14, 15, 5). Sheldon and Hatch (9, 10, 11) and Hatch and Sheldon (7) compared the individual reading performances of groups of good and poor readers in grades 2, 3, 4 , and 6 as measured by the Durrell Analysis of Read ing Difficulty. They found that: a. Word by word reading was a common charac teristic in good and poor readers i n second grade, and a common characteristic of only poor readers in grades 3, 4, and 6. b. Poor or scanty unaided recall was common to both good and poor readers after oral and silent reading. c. At second grade level, both good and poor readers tend to ignore punctuation. d. At the second gradelevel the error occurring in the greatest number of cases was the substitution of whole words which were similar in form. e. Low sight vocabulary was a common charac teristic of poor readers in grades 2, 3, and 4. Six ty-eight percent of second grade pupils, 81% of third grade pupils, and 68% of fourth grade pupils classi fied as poor readers were reported as having low sight vocabularies. No percentages were given for the good readers. Characteristics were reported only when 50% of a group had the characteristic. Durrell (3) reports that the average reading rates for children examined at the Boston University Clin ic were 45 words per minute for first grade, 80 words per minute for second grade, and 110 words per minute for third grade. He does not report how this was measured. The purpose of this study was to record the oral reading performances of thirty-six second grade children in reading materials below grade level, at grade level, and above grade level, and to compare the oral performances of the good, average, and poor readers.

Responses to material presented during various levels of sleep.

Abstract : Ninety-six questions and answers were played to the Ss once each at five minute intervals throughout the sleep period. Both the percentage of immediate responses and the percentage of items recalled correctly decreased as the percentage of alpha frequencies decreased. Shortly after occipital alpha frequencies disappeared from the EEG, immediate responses and item recall also stopped. This was more evident when tested by recognition than by unaided recall. Approximately 5% of the items presented during non-alpha levels were responded to immediately, recalled later, or both. A majority of these items occurred when particular EEG patterns associated with arousal occurred; alternative explanations other than sleep-learning are offered for the few remaining items. Learning during real sleep is concluded to be impractical and probably impossible. (Author)