Citation

Nelson DL, McEvoy CL, Schreiber TA. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cogn. 1990; 16(1): 31-41.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa 33620.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1990, American Psychological Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

2136751

Abstract

Studying a familiar word activates its associates in long-term memory. In the present experiments we manipulated the number of associates activated by words studied in the presence of unrelated context words, meaningfully related context words, or in the absence of modifying context words. Memory was tested by either cued or free recall. The results showed that the number of directly activated associates can facilitate, have no effect, or disrupt recall for studied words. The direction and magnitude of the effects of number of activated associates is shown to be determined by the encoding/retrieval context. Implications for the distinction between episodic and semantic memory are discussed.

Language: en