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A developmental study of relations between free recall, cued recall, and recall of incidental material
Author(s) -
WRIGHT JOHAN
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9450.1978.tb00321.x
Subject(s) - recall , psychology , recall test , free recall , context (archaeology) , context dependent memory , colored , cued speech , cued recall , cognitive psychology , task (project management) , object (grammar) , serial position effect , communication , developmental psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , paleontology , materials science , management , economics , composite material , biology
Six‐, 9‐, 17–19‐, 45–55‐, and 65‐year‐old subjects were shown 16 slides depicting one colored object and two uncolored context objects in a common setting, the task being to learn the names of the colored objects. Free and cued recall of both colored and context items were tested, the context objects being used as retrieval cues for the colored ones, and vice versa. The relative superiority of cued recall to free recall decreased regularly with increasing age. In the oldest subjects the level of free recall of TBR‐objects was still fairly high, the level of recall of context objects being very low. The results support the hypothesis that adults encode nominally irrelevant context materials to a decreasing extent with increasing age, and that memory traces of young people in this sense are “richer”, i.e., contain a greater number/variety of potential retrieval cues, than those of the elderly.