Free recall is a basic paradigm used to study human memory. In a freerecall task, a subject is presented a list of to-be-remembered items, one atat time. For example, an experimenter might read a list of 20 words aloud,presenting a new word to the subject every 4 seconds. At the end of thepresentation of the list, the subject is asked to recall the items (e.g., bywriting down as many items from the list as possible). It is called a freerecall task because the subject is free to recall the items in any order thathe or she desires.
The free recall task is of interest to cognitive science because itprovided some of the basic information used to decompose the mental state term"memory" into simpler subfunctions ("primary memory", "secondary memory"). This is because the results of a free recall task were typically plotted as aserial position curve. This curve exhibited a recency effect and a primacyeffect. The behavior of these two effects provided support to the hypothesisthat the free recall task called upon both a short-term and a long-termmemory.
See Also:
Primacy Effect | Recency Effect | Serial Position Curve
Contributed by M.R.W. Dawson, October 12, 1995
