Trade-Off between Remembering Words and Their Source of Location

Abstract

On each of 32 trials subjects heard 32 words, 16 presented to each ear in a randomly alternating manner. The subjects were requested to remember the location of the source of the words and to recall the words themselves. Memory for location was assessed by a recognition probe. A probe presented on each trial had to be judged as new or old and, if it was called old, it had to be identified as left or right. Then free recall followed. The subjects were able to identify the location of the probe at a better than chance level. However, further analysis gave evidence of such memory only on trials with relatively low recall. These results replicate findings by Geiselman and Belleza (1976) that retaining the location of verbal materials occurs at the expense of remembering the materials.