The Ease-of-task and Part-List Cuing Effect

TANG Wei-Hai; XIE Sai-Yuan; LIU Tuan-Li; LIU Xi-Beng

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2012, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (3) : 581-587.

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Abstract

The part-list cuing effect is that a presentation of a subset of learnt items as retrieval cues can have detrimental effects on recall of the remaining items. There were 3 experiments in the current study to investigate the part-list cuing effect with Chinese words. We used the un-related/related words semantically and different orders of words presentation when people studied the lists to control the difficulty of the three tasks, in order to know if the task difficulty would be a factor to affect the effect of part-list cuing. All of them used the same design model which included study-test circle. All the participants learned a same words list of 30 items in study phase for per experiment, and then the participants of control group were instructed to free recall all the items in un-cued condition, the cued group were provided with a subset of 10 intralist items and use them as retrieval cues for recalling the remaining items. The different performance between cued group and un-cued group on reminding items showed the size of the effect. Experiment 1 used 30 words out of 6 categories but presented randomly when people studied. What the participants studied in experiment 2 were 30 words un-related semantically while presented randomly. In experiment 3 other 30 words were used out of those 6 categories as well while presented in the way of categories. The findings show that:（1）part-list cuing effect exists all the time whatever the task difficulty is. That means the Retrieval Inhibition Hypothesis is right. （2） It is the average difficulty task under which people got the biggest size of part-list cuing effect. The sizes of part-list cuing effects under easiest task and hardest task conditions are both decreasing. That means we cannot get the conclusion that the Strategy Disruption Hypothesis must be wrong.

Key words

part-list cuing effect / Strategy Disruption Hypothesis / difficulty-of-task / size of pat-list cuing effect

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The Ease-of-task and Part-List Cuing Effect[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2012, 35(3): 581-587

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