| Abstract: | Five experiments with 150 undergraduates examined the hypothesis that hypermnesia (improved recall across repeated tests) can be predicted from cumulative recall levels. Contrary to this view, Exp I demonstrated that when the cumulative recall levels for pictures and words were equated, pictures still produced a larger hypermnesic effect. Results of Exps II and III show that varying test length (and thus recall level) had no effect on the magnitude of the hypermnesic effect. In Exp IV, Ss studied a categorized word list and then received 1 21-min test or 3 7-min tests. Results suggest that (a) similar retrieval processes are used in these 2 conditions and (b) hypermnesia in the repeated test paradigm results from Ss generating covert cues to aid item recovery across tests. Overall findings suggest that although hypermnesia is related to cumulative recall levels, various other factors (e.g., item type) modulate the magnitude of the hypermnesia by affecting item accessibility across tests. It is argued that changes in item accessibility across tests, caused by learning during testing, play a major role in producing hypermnesia in both episodic and semantic memory tasks. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
