Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition

Retrieval: Getting Information Out of Memory • 183

to remember. The words were drawn from specifi c categories

such as birds (pigeon, sparrow), furniture (chair, dresser), and

professions (engineer, lawyer), although the categories were

not specifi cally indicated in the original list. For the memory

test, participants in the free recall group were asked to write

down as many words as they could. Participants in the cued

recall group were also asked to recall the words, but were pro-

vided with the names of the categories, “birds,” “furniture,” and

“professions” (● Figure 7.10).

The results of Tulving and Pearlstone’s experiment

demonstrate that retrieval cues aid memory. Participants

in the free recall group recalled 40 percent of the words,

whereas participants in the cued recall group recalled

75 percent of the words.

One of the most impressive demonstrations of the

power of retrieval cues was provided by Timo Mantyla

(1986), who presented his participants with a list of 600 nouns, such as banana, freedom,

and tree. During learning, the participants were told to write down three words they asso-

ciated with each noun. For example, three words for banana might be yellow, bunches,

and edible. When the participants took a surprise memory test, in which they were pre-

sented with the three words they had created and were asked to produce the original

word, they were able to remember 90 percent of the 600 words (top bar in ● Figure 7.11).

Mantyla ran another group of participants who did not create the three cues on

their own. For each noun, they were provided with three cues that had been gener-

ated by someone else. When participants in this condition were later presented with

the three cue words, they were able to remember 55 percent of the nouns (second bar

in Figure 7.11). You might think it would be possible to guess banana from the three

properties yellow, bunches, and edible, even if you had never been presented with the

word banana. But when Mantyla ran another control group in which he presented the

cue words generated by someone else to participants who had never seen the original

nouns, these participants were able to determine only 17 percent of the nouns. The

results of this experiment demonstrate that retrieval cues (the three words) provide

extremely effective information for retrieving

memories, but that retrieval cues are signifi -

cantly more effective when they are created

by the person whose memory is being tested.

(Also see Wagenaar, 1986, for a description of a

study in which Wagenaar was able to remember

almost all of 2,400 diary entries he kept over a

6-year period by using retrieval cues.)

MATCHING CONDITIONS

OF ENCODING AND RETRIEVAL

The retrieval cues in the two experiments we

just described were verbal “hints”—category

names like “furniture” in the Tulving and

Pearlstone experiment, and three-word descrip-

tions created by the participants in the Mantyla

experiment. But we have also seen another kind

of “hint” that can help with retrieval: returning

to a specifi c location, such as Angela’s grandpar-

ents’ house or my offi ce.

● FIGURE 7.10 Design of the Tulving and Pearlstone (1966)
experiment. The memory performance for each group is shown
on the right.

List of words

presented

“Recall the

words”

Acquisition

Memory test

instructions

Free
recall
group

40

Percent

words recalled

List of words

presented

“Recall the words.

The categories

were birds,

furniture...”

Cued
recall
group

75

● FIGURE 7.11 Mantyla’s (1986) experiment. Memory was best when
retrieval cues were created by the participant (top bar) and not as good
when retrieval cues were created by someone else (middle bar). Participants
guessed a small percentage of the words if they had not seen the words and
saw only cues created by someone else (bottom bar).

During learning

created cues for “banana,” etc.

Own cues provided in test.

During learning
saw “banana” and cues created
by someone else. Other person’s
cues provided in test.

Didn’t participate in learning.

Other person’s cues provided

in test.

Percent words remembered

20

17

55

90

40 60 80 100

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