The Role of Rules in Recall
Howard R. Pollio, Joshua R. Gerow · The American Journal of Psychology · 1968
Recall-clustering, as first described by Bousfield,' is subject to both associative and information-processing explanations. Associative explanations assume that Ss cluster words in recall to the degree that the words share common associative relations, e.g. are mutual word associates2 or are semantically similar.3 Informational analyses, on the other hand, assume that Ss actively organize or code materials into categories on the basis of some rule or strategy during acquisition and that recall is best considered a later reconstruction on the basis of the initial coding rule.4 Since the role of associative factors in clustering has been reasonably well established, the present experiments attempted to determine the role of coding rules in recall and recall-clustering. In a free-recall task involving clustered materials, it is reasonable to assume that Ss rearrange randomly presented materials so as to minimize the number of specific items to be stored. Under this strategy, specific category-items need not be retained but rather may be subsumed under more general rubrics such as the category-name and later generated during recall itself. Thus, Ss presented the letters C, A, and T would code these into a single word, and their production of the individual letters during recall could be construed as a case of generation or reconstruction during recall. Such an analysis implies that if Ss were told explicitly the rule by which a categorized list was constructed, this information would facilitate the storageor reconstructionstages of memory and thereby lead to increased clustering and greater total