Abstract
The organization of information when it is retrieved from situation models was explored using recognition and recall tests. A fan effect paradigm was used to assess organization in recognition and a clustering measure was used in recall. People memorized either object-location facts (e.g., “The pay phone is in the city hall”) or person/small location facts (e.g., “The banker is on the witness stand”). For object-location facts, a location-based organization was observed in both recall and recognition. However, for person/small location facts, a location-based organization was observed for recall, and a person-based organization was observed for recognition. Thus, the observed organization was flexible depending on the retrieval task.
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Portions of the research reported here were presented at the 1992 meeting of the Psychonomic Society in St. Louis. This research was supported in part by National Institute on Aging Grant AGO 4306 awarded to Lynn Hasher and Rose Zacks, and in part by NIMH National Research Service Award MH14257, while G.A.R. was a postdoctoral trainee in the Quantitative Methods Program of the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I would like to thank Laura Carlson-Radvansky, Tom Carr, and Rose Zacks for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Beth Chittenden, Sharron Francis, Zenzi Griffin, Dennis Larson, Dan Spieler, and Christy Stewart for their assistance in collecting the data.
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Radvansky, G.A. The organization of information retrieved from situation models. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5, 283–289 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212952
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212952