Effects of three types of repetition on cued and noncued recall of words

Abstract

Three list-item memory experiments explored the effects of three types of repetition of a basic unit consisting of two words in an explicitly designated conceptual category. The types were repetition of the complete basic unit, repetition of the category name with two new instances, and repetition of the category name only. All types of repetition showed a large facilitative effect on recall of the basic unit. The effect was considerably larger when repetitions were spaced rather than massed, and it manifested itself mainly in enhanced accessibility of higher-order units (categories) rather than access to elements within these units (words within accessible categories). The results as a whole suggest that the structure of the higher-order memory units is hierarchical, with access to the unit possible only through its control element.