Abstract
The main purpose of this study was to investigate the mechanism of increasing of recall total in the repeated free emission task. Thirty-one or 53 subjects recalled flower names twice for 12 or 10 minutes. All the recalled names were classified into two classes according to the subjects' introspective reports after the recall: One class had the items which were recalled with some cues (IWC), and the other contained the items which were recalled without such cues (IWOC). Mean number of IWC increased with trials, while that of IWOC was constant. Fifteen percent of all names that were emitted in trial 1 disappeared in trial 2. This is contrary to the reinforcement theory. The mechanism of increase in recall total was inferred from the cue based encoding, storage and retrieval strategy of subjects. The 40 episodic retrieval cues that were introduced at the beginning or in the middle of recall time made no contribution to the increment of recall total.
