A Consolidated Theoretical View of Stimulus-List Organization Effects in Free Recall

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretically oriented view of much of the evidence about the effects of different ways of arranging conceptually categorized materials for presentation. Most basically, the evidence indicates that blocking instances of the same category together, rather than “randomizing” them, reliably produces greater category clustering, whereas total recall is significantly augmented only about half of the time. The consolidated theoretical view described here incorporates most of the existing explanatory notions. It stresses initially that stimulus-list organization influences the probability that related items will be in short-term storage simultaneously and will thereby be more effectively processed or encoded for transfer to long-term storage. A more recent development emphasizes the additional influence of input organization upon retrieval cues, plans, codes, etc., for facilitating output from long-term storage. Finally, the newest extension of the basic position proposes slightly different sources of cueing for recall of categories and recall of items within categories.