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PSI CHI: The International Honor Society in Psychology

The International Honor Society in Psychology

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Memory of Remembering: Investigating the Forgot-It-All-Along Effect Using Pictures

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by Erron L. Benner and D. Stephen Lindsay - University of Victoria

Categories: Cognitive | Memory


Forgot-it-all-along (FIA) refers to a memory phenomenon wherein prior episodes of remembering are forgotten. Arnold and Lindsay (2002, 2005) found that when a word is remembered in different ways on separate occasions, individuals are more likely to forget recalling the word on the first occasion. The FIA effect has also been observed for autobiographical stimuli, which typically contain a stronger visual imagery component relative to verbal stimuli (Rubin, 2005). To reduce the gap between verbal and autobiographical stimuli, the present study investigated whether a FIA effect could be obtained using pictorial stimuli. Forty-eight undergraduate students studied 48 homographs, each presented in one of two contexts. Homographs were presented as words for some subjects, as line drawings for others. Context (studied vs. other) was manipulated across two successive cued-recall tests. For each item on the second cued recall test, subjects were asked if they had recalled that item on the first test. Results revealed an equivalent FIA effect for pictorial and word stimuli. The findings are interpreted within the transfer-appropriate processing and source monitoring frameworks.

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