In free recall tasks, when low- and high-frequency items are mixed within the to-be-remembered lists, the usual recall advantage found for high-frequency words is eliminated or reversed. Recently, this mixed-list paradox has also been demonstrated for short-term serial recall (Hulme, Stuart, Brown, and Morin, 2003). Although a number of theoretical interpretations of this mixed-list paradox have been proposed, researchers have also suggested that it could simply be a result of participant-controlled strategies (M. J. Watkins, LeCompte, and Kim, 2000). The present study was designed to assess whether this explanation could be applied to immediate and delayed serial recall. The results showed that high-frequency words were recalled better than low-frequency words in pure lists, but that this effect was eliminated in mixed lists, whether they were given under intentional or incidental learning conditions. This pattern suggests that the mixed-list paradox cannot be explained by participant-controlled strategies.
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This commentary is a reply to the article "Intent matters: Resolving the intentional versus incidental learning paradox in episodic long-term memory" by Popov and Dames (2022). In their article, the authors question the view that once adequate deep, elaborate, and organizational processes have been induced incidentally, the intention to learn adds nothing further to the level of subsequent retention. Opposing this view, Popov and Dames conclude that intention to learn is always necessary for good memory performance and support this claim with the results of 11 experiments in which they find strong effects of intentionality using mixed-list designs in which all items are processed semantically but only half need be remembered later.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntent matters: Resolving the intentional versus incidental learning paradox in episodic long-term memory.
J Exp Psychol Gen
January 2023
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich.
Decades of research have established that the intent to remember information has no effect on episodic long-term memory. This claim, which is routinely taught in introductory cognitive psychology courses, is based entirely on pure-list between-subjects designs in which memory performance is equal for intentional and incidental learning groups. In the current 11 experiments, participants made semantic judgements about each word in a list but they had to remember only words presented in a specific color.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe mixed truth about frequency effects on free recall: effects of study list composition.
Psychon Bull Rev
October 2007
University of Toronto, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada.
The mixed-list paradox is the finding that high-frequency words show a recall advantage in blocked lists, but that this advantage is reversed or nullified in mixed lists. We argue that this paradox has been poorly defined. Specifically, researchers should investigate random and alternating lists separately.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWord frequency and the mixed-list paradox in immediate and delayed serial recall.
Psychon Bull Rev
August 2006
Psychology Department, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, England.
In free recall tasks, when low- and high-frequency items are mixed within the to-be-remembered lists, the usual recall advantage found for high-frequency words is eliminated or reversed. Recently, this mixed-list paradox has also been demonstrated for short-term serial recall (Hulme, Stuart, Brown, and Morin, 2003). Although a number of theoretical interpretations of this mixed-list paradox have been proposed, researchers have also suggested that it could simply be a result of participant-controlled strategies (M.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAntisaccades and task-switching: interactions in controlled processing.
Exp Brain Res
June 2002
Department of Neurology, KS452, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA.
Smaller latency costs for switching from dominant (habitual) to non-dominant (unusual) tasks compared to the reverse direction have been noted in some studies of task-switching. This asymmetry has been cited as evidence of inhibitory effects from the prior trial. We examined accuracy and latency costs of task-switching between prosaccades and antisaccades, where task-switching is limited to stimulus-response re-mapping and occurs between tasks highly asymmetric in dominance.
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