Abstract
An estimate of the reliability with which information about specific people could be retrieved from semantic memory was made. College-aged subjects were asked to describe 10 friends and 10 famous people. They then performed the identical task 1 week later. For personal friends, they listed a mean of 8.02 attributes, and for famous people, 5.72 attributes. The estimate of recall reliability using the common-element correlation was.38 for friends and.55 for famous people. The between-subjects correlation for attributes of famous people was.21. Reasons for the modest reliability values, such as the inadequacy of the prompts and the complexity of the responses, are discussed.
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Portions of this research were presented at the meeting of the Psy-chonomic Society in Minneapolis, MN, in November 1982. This research was supported in part by a grant from the Field-Wiltsie Foundation. Thanks go to Kathy Kamin, Sylvia Sims, Rosalind Whatley, and Cathy Young for their assistance in collecting and scoring the data. Thanks also go to Ohio University Computer and Learning Services for making computer time and their facilities available.
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Bellezza, F.S. Reliability of retrieval from semantic memory: Information about people. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 22, 511–513 (1984). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333893
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333893