Remembering Trivia

It is shown first that subjects remember with better than chance success surface features of sentences (form and appearance) that are irrelevant to comprehension and interpretation. Subsequent experiments analysed the basis of this aspect of recognition. They reveal that the basis is not a pictorial memory of the sentences, nor a phonemic or articulatory memory. Rather, the effect seems to require that the subject have detailed knowledge of the symbol system in which the sentences appear, a mere " read out " from a purely perceptual short-term memory is insufficient. The results also suggest that many features of text are encoded, stored, and subsequently recognized when the subject is " reading for meaning ".