The Memory Monitoring and Control on the Part-list Cuing Effect

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (3) : 564-568.

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PDF(680 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2015, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (3) : 564-568.

The Memory Monitoring and Control on the Part-list Cuing Effect

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Abstract

When people are asked to recall words they have studied earlier from a list, those given a subset of these words as cues recall fewer words than people who do not receive any cues. This phenomenon is the so called part-list effect. Part-list cuing effect has proven robust in free recall, having been replicated under a wide variety of laboratory manipulations, including: episodic and semantic memory, categorized and uncategorized lists, nonlinguistic stimuli, intra- and extra-list cuing, and varying numbers of cues. Two hypothesis received more attention——the retrieval inhibition hypothesis and the strategy disruption hypothesis. Retrieval inhibition hypothesis suggests that the long-term change in activation level of target items is the basis of part-list cuing effect; while strategy disruption hypothesis explains the part-list cuing effect as the retrieval strategy disruption by part-list cues. Adopting 3 experiments, we studied the effect of learners' memory monitoring and control on part-list cuing effect. Experiment 1 examined whether participants could tell the difference of the two recall mode and allocate their study time differently after study once. Experiment 2 examined the same thing, except that the participants had several times to experience the recall mode. In experiment 3, we inserted a retrospective ease-of-task judgement before self-paced study, which was to explore whether the memory monitoring could affect the memory control and the study time allocation. The findings show that: (1) The amount of study time had no differences between the free recall and part-list cuing recall group after their first self-paced study; (2) After practice, people could realize the detrimental effect of the part-list cues; (3) After their first self-paced study, participants cannot monitor the negative effect of the part-list cues, and the ease-of-task judgement value between the part-list cuing recall group and free recall group are of no difference. But the participants can control the learning time in their next self-paced study. The learning time of part-list cuing recall group was much higher than free recall group, and the part-list cuing recall group's recall performance was enhanced. The present findings revealed that people couldn’t realize the detrimental effect of the part-list cues, and then couldn’t predict that the part-list cuing recall was more difficult compared to free recall in their first self-paced study, and after practice they allocated more study time to part-list cuing recall compared to free recall, which indicate that the realization of the detrimental effect of part-list cues is a process of gradual understanding. Ease-of-task judgement itself is a restricting factor of study time allocating, and it is an effective means to speed up the realization processing of the detrimental effect of part-list cues.

Key words

part-list cuing effect / memory monitoring and control / allocation of study time / retrospective ease-of-task judgement / experimenter-paced study / self-paced study

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The Memory Monitoring and Control on the Part-list Cuing Effect[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2015, 38(3): 564-568
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