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Text memory and integration at different times of day
Author(s) -
Oakhill Jane
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/acp.2350020306
Subject(s) - recall , morning , task (project management) , psychology , degree (music) , cognitive psychology , time of day , free recall , developmental psychology , management , acoustics , medicine , economics , zoology , physics , biology
This paper reports an experiment that explored whether the extent to which the ideas in a text are integrated changes over the day. In order to monitor integration, a task used by Wilkes, Alred and Al‐Ahmar (1983) was adopted. The assumption underlying the task was that information that is inconsistent with respect to preceding information in a text will be remembered differently from information that is not inconsistent. Obviously, such selective remembering cannot occur if the information in the text is not integrated, so the degree to which differential remembering occurs can be taken as an index of degree of integration. Although the predicted differences in degree of integration between morning and afternoon subjects were not confirmed, the morning superiority effect in text recall was replicated, and it was demonstrated that this superiority arose because of the morning subjects' better memory for the exact wording of the text. In addition, subjects showed different types of recall error at the two times of day. These errors are discussed in relation to subjects' hypothesized changes in strategy over the day.