Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists
In serial recall experiments, human subjects are requested to retrieve a list of words in the same order as they were presented. In a classical study, participants were reported to recall more words from study lists composed of short words compared to lists of long words, the word length effect. The...
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| Format: | Online |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2014
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4196586/ |
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pubmed-41965862014-10-28 Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists Katkov, Mikhail Romani, Sandro Tsodyks, Misha Neuroscience In serial recall experiments, human subjects are requested to retrieve a list of words in the same order as they were presented. In a classical study, participants were reported to recall more words from study lists composed of short words compared to lists of long words, the word length effect. The world length effect was also observed in free recall experiments, where subjects can retrieve the words in any order. Here we analyzed a large dataset from free recall experiments of unrelated words, where short and long words were randomly mixed, and found a seemingly opposite effect: long words are recalled better than the short ones. We show that our recently proposed mechanism of associative retrieval can explain both these observations. Moreover, the direction of the effect depends solely on the way study lists are composed. Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-10-14 /pmc/articles/PMC4196586/ /pubmed/25352804 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2014.00129 Text en Copyright © 2014 Katkov, Romani and Tsodyks. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Katkov, Mikhail Romani, Sandro Tsodyks, Misha |
| spellingShingle |
Katkov, Mikhail Romani, Sandro Tsodyks, Misha Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| author_facet |
Katkov, Mikhail Romani, Sandro Tsodyks, Misha |
| author_sort |
Katkov, Mikhail |
| title |
Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| title_short |
Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| title_full |
Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| title_fullStr |
Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| title_full_unstemmed |
Word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| title_sort |
word length effect in free recall of randomly assembled word lists |
| description |
In serial recall experiments, human subjects are requested to retrieve a list of words in the same order as they were presented. In a classical study, participants were reported to recall more words from study lists composed of short words compared to lists of long words, the word length effect. The world length effect was also observed in free recall experiments, where subjects can retrieve the words in any order. Here we analyzed a large dataset from free recall experiments of unrelated words, where short and long words were randomly mixed, and found a seemingly opposite effect: long words are recalled better than the short ones. We show that our recently proposed mechanism of associative retrieval can explain both these observations. Moreover, the direction of the effect depends solely on the way study lists are composed. |
| publisher |
Frontiers Media S.A. |
| publishDate |
2014 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4196586/ |
| _version_ |
1613144633315950592 |