Two opposing theories of trace storage in free recall, the trace organization at storage hypothesis and the trace organization at retrieval hypothesis were investigated using the technique of cued recall. Subjects sorted 84 unrelated words into 28 groups of 3 words and then were asked to recall the sorted words without cues, with cue doublets taken from within each sorted group or with cue doublets combined at random from the input words. The results strongly support the contention that the acquisition of a list of unrelated words involves the storage of cohesive subjective groups and that accessibility to subjective groups may be provided via test cues selected from the input list.
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