1988 Volume 59 Issue 4 Pages 234-240
Two experiments examined the effects of test-expectancies and test-sequence orders on the phenomenon of recognition failure. In Experiment 1, 18 college students, half of which were male and the other half were female, were randomly divided into two experimental groups. Half of the subjects studied the 42 cue word-target pairs in anticipation of a cued recall test, while the remaining subjects studied the pairs in anticipation of a recognition test. In Experiment 2, 36 college students (18 male and 18 femal students) were randomly divided into two experimental groups. Half of the subjects were tested successively, first for recognition and then for recall, and the remaining subjects were tested in the reverse order. The results showed that the magnitude of recognition failure decreased when the subjects expected the recognition test. There were no appreciable sequential testing effects on the magnitude of recognition failure, however. These results imply that the phenomenon of recognition failure is not an artifactual one in the recognition-recall testing order, and that the magnitude depends on encoding conditions.
