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Relational and item-specific information in memory

1981; Academic Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0022-5371(81)90138-9

1878-4097

R. Reed Hunt, Gilles O. Einstein,

Child and Animal Learning Development

This paper develops the argument that many factors affecting retention can be understood in the context of a distinction between relational and individual-item processing. Relational processing refers to the encoding of similarities among a class of events and individual-item processing refers to encoding of item-specific information. Both forms of information are assumed to be important in retention, and the empirical argument for the distinction rests in part upon the reported demonstration of superior recall when both types of information are encoded. The experiments also demonstrate that variables influencing the type of processing, such as orienting instructions and the type of material, produce differential effects upon certain dependent measures. Thus, the data indicate facilitation of recall from the combination of relational and item-specific information, and further suggest the viability of a distinction between them because of differential effects of the two forms of processing upon recognition, clustering, and the relative recall of typical and atypical category instances.