The Effect of Related and Unrelated Details on the Recall of Major Ideas in Prose

Abstract

A series of three experiments was conducted to examine the effect of related and unrelated details on the recall of major ideas in text. Experiment 1 varied the number of related and unrelated details supporting major ideas within paragraphs and found recall determined by the number of related and unrelated details. Experiment 2 was designed to determine if directions given readers that required them to process unrelated details would influence recall. The results suggested that the number of related and unrelated details had an effect on the recall of major ideas similar to that seen in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 was constructed such that readers were required to carefully process unrelated details in a categorizing task. The results supported those of Experiments 1 and 2.