Abstract
Maintenance rehearsal was studied in an incidental learning paradigm where the subjects were required to find out a target item in a 6×6 letter matrix. In Experiment I, performances on a free recall test and a recognition test of the searched items which followed item search tasks were not related to item search time. This result suggested that maintenance rehearsal did not have a differential effect on recall and recognition, that is, it did not influence the longterm memory. On the other hand, Experiment II showed that the percentage of correct recall increased with the length of maintenance rehearsal when the subjects attended closely to the item during the item search task, which suggested that maintenance rehearsal acted as a kind of elaborative rehearsal. These results implied that the distinction between maintenance and elaborative rehearsals should perhaps be replaced by a maintence-elaborative continuum.
