Non Cued Recall Essay

The cognitive level of analysis focuses on how mental processes such as perception, language, memory and attention influence human behaviour. Memory is an active information-processing system that receives, organises, stores and recovers information. Recall can be defined as the action or ability to remember something that was learned or experienced. Cued (or contextual based) recall refers to the way information is presented, or the situation in which information is encoded and retrieved, then recalled when the same context is presented (McLeod, 2008). Evidence on this method of memory recall indicates that retrieval is more likely when the context at encoding matches the context at retrieval.

For the purpose of this experiment, the replication of the aforementioned study Tulving and Pearlstone’s (1966), the aim of this experiment is to investigate the effect of non-cued recall ability and cued recall ability of levels of retrieval. It was hypothesised that retrieval would be increased when cued recall was used compared to non-cued recall. Participants were split into 2 groups and given a list of 48 words

Participants were split into two conditions, participants in condition one were presented with a word list and then asked to recall as many as possible (free recall). In the second condition, researchers presented the same words but as part of a story (cued recall). The results displayed that participants had better recall in the second condition because they had categorised the words according to the story. The results suggested that the children used chunking and recalled items according to categories. It was concluded that memory processing was improved due to categorisation, chunking and cued recall. (Hannibal,