The proposed research constitutes an investigation of human episodic memory. The research is conceptualized, and would eventually be reported, from a metatheoretical perspective that is probabilistic and radically functional. This perspective is free of many of the problems of perspectives based on the information-processing metaphor--a metaphor that dominates virtually all contemporary cognitive research. Much of the proposed research will involve presenting subjects (mostly college students) with lists of items (usually randomly selected words) and then after a variable interval administering one of several kinds of memory test. The individual experiments form two broad groups. The first concern the subjective side of memory, and its relation to the performance side. Some intriguing instances of dissociation of these two aspects of memory, recently observed in the Principal Investigator's and other laboratories, will be followed up. One study will pursue the notion that episodes can be recalled generically--i.e., as a set and without recall of any individual episodes. Basically, word lists will be presented with some words occurring once and others twice, and then the extent (if any) to which recall of the twice-presented words exceeds predictions based on the level of recall of once-presented words will be determined. Another study will examine the phenomenon of memory without awareness. Since such memory is characteristic of amnesic people, such research should further our understanding of the nature of amnesia. Yet other studies concern the role of concentration in recall, the effect of rehearsal, and the nature of echoic memory. The echoic memory study will pursue some tentative evidence that certain kinds of profoundly deaf people--namely, those who communicate orally--may be just as strongly affected by echoic memory as are people with normal hearing. The second group of experiments will explore the nature of memory cueing--an especially important issue when memory is conceptualized from a probabilistic perspective. One study will compare the effect certain variables have on performance in the familiar free recall and recognition tests with their effect on cued recall. Another will test a key assumption underlying the methodology used to derive """"""""cuegrams,"""""""" or contingency relations between different classes of cues.
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