IS RETRIEVABILITY GROUPING GOOD FOR RECALL

Most theories suppose that during unconstrained retrieval easy-to-retrieve items will be accessed before hard-to-retrieve items. Recent free-recall studies have supported a different access order, the cognitive triage pattern, in which hard-to-retrieve items are accessed first. The present experiments demonstrated that this pattern enhances total recall. In Experiments 1-3, clustering type measures of goodness of triage (grouping output according to items' levels of retrievability) predicted total recall in children and adults. In Experiments 4 and 5, goodness-of-triage measures predicted total recall when they were derived from on-line information about retrievability (error-success histories), but not when they were derived from normative information about retrievability (frequency and meaningfulness ratings).