FEATURES OF RECOGNITION TASKS IN ENCODING SPECIFICITY

THE FUNCTION OF FREE ASSOCIATES TASKS AND NON-VERBAL TASKS

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the generality of the encoding specificity principle. Three experiments were carried out, each consisting of two conditions, the free associates task (FA) and the non-verbal task (NV). Three experiments differed in the number of free associates and their corresponding study time. The results were as follows: (a) The superiority of recall over recognition was shown only in FA of each experiment; (b) the differences among three experiments in recall and recognition were also obtained in FA. These results cast doubt on the generality of the encoding specificity principle, and suggest rather the inter-task interference including features of recognition words.