Effects of Information and Cueing on Recall and Organization of a Categorizable Word List

Abstract

Ss in the information-category name group were told words could be categorized and were given the category names as cues at each recall; Ss with information but no category names were told the words could be categorized but were exposed to the category names only one time, and the no-information group was given no indication the words could be categorized. The results indicated that groups with information but no category name and no information did not differ on number of words recalled or subjective organization but did differ on category clustering. Ss with information and category name exceeded the no-information group on words recalled and subjective organization as well as clustering. The results were discussed in terms of the implications for storage-retrieval systems.