Variability in free versus cued recall
Date
2024
Authors
Mah, Eric Y.
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Abstract
Two tasks that have been used extensively to study memory are free recall (FR; study a list of words and later attempt to recall as many as possible) and cued recall tasks (CR; study a list of randomly or meaningfully paired cue and target words and later attempt to recall targets given cues). A long tradition of fruitful research using these tasks has resulted in a host of effects that offer insight into human memory. Here we describe one such novel effect and its potential implications for theories of memory. The effect in question–which we refer to as the ‘CR:FR variability effect’–is a surprising difference in inter-individual variability in performance between the two memory tasks. Specifically, in an initial experiment we observed greater individual differences in CR accuracy than in FR accuracy among individuals who performed both tasks. This result ran counter to our intuitions about the two memory tasks (e.g., one might expect that the lack of explicit retrieval structure in FR versus CR leaves more room for individual differences), and did not seem to be accounted for by popular formal models of memory (e.g., the Search of Associative Memory model; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981). The vast majority of research using these tasks has focused exclusively on differences in measures of central tendency, and we found no published research comparing individual differences in free and cued recall. Our research project investigated the CR:FR variability effect and potential explanations for the effect via systematic and incremental manipulations to our stimuli and experimental designs. Specifically, across seven experiments we tested and replicated the effect using a general pool of ‘average’ English nouns (Experiment 1; N = 120 undergraduates), with a forced-recall procedure (Experiments 2A & 2B; N = 117 Prolific participants, N = 120 undergraduates), with meaningfully-related word pairs (Experiment 3; N = 260 Prolific participants), equating the study phases (Experiment 4; N = 360 Prolific participants), allowing participants self-paced study (Experiment 5; N = 120 undergraduates), and implementing serial recall for CR (Experiment 6; N = 211 undergraduates). Having ruled out primarily methodological explanations, we conducted a final experiment in which participants were instructed to use an imagery-based memory strategy previously shown to be effective (Thomas et al., 2023), with a pool of words conducive to imagery (Madan et al., 2010). In this experiment (Experiment 7; N = 208 Prolific participants), we did not observe the variability effect. We argue that individual differences in strategy use–due partly to task constraints in FR and CR, and partly to differential individual variability within different strategies–explain the CR:FR variability effect. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of memory and future memory research.
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Keywords
memory, free recall, cued recall, individual differences