Learning a list for free recall: Selective reminding versus the standard procedure

Abstract

Almost all free-recall experiments involve an acquisition phase in which the set of to-be-learned items is presented repeatedly in its entirety. Two experiments are described that pit this standard procedure against the selective reminding procedure (Buschke, 1973), wherein only items incorrect on trial n are presented again on trial n+ 1. The two methods were virtually identical in terms of (1) trials to reach an acquisition criterion of one errorless recall, (2) number of items correct on each recall trial during acquisition, (3) number of items correct on a 3-week delayed-recall test, (4) number of items correctly relearned after the 3-week retention interval, (5) extent of subjective organization on all retention tests, and (6) pattern of errors over all test trials. These results generalized to both single-category and random lists of 20 words, and were thoroughly consistent across the two experiments. However, the standard procedure required that many more items be presented over trials, and more subjects failed to learn the list within 1 h using the standard procedure. Because the selective reminding procedure is more efficient and has no apparent drawbacks, it is recommended that memory researchers switch to selective reminding as the preferred way to teach a subject a free-recall list. © 1985 Psychonomic Society, Inc.