Cued Recall

Synonyms

Primed recall; Prompted recall

Definition

Cued recall refers to retrieving information from long-term memory using aids or cues. Cues can be external stimuli, such as words, sentences, incomplete pictures, letters within a word, and so on, as long as they have some kind of connection to the to-be-remembered (target) information. That connection might be a semantic or associative relationship, temporal co-occurrence of a cue and target, or the cue could actually be the target presented in an incomplete form. For example, recall of the target TIGER might be cued with lion, A ____ has stripes, an incomplete drawing of a tiger, or TI___. Cues can also be internal. For example, people may be asked to think about what they were thinking about, their mood, or the spatio-temporal context at the time that they encountered a target in an attempt to cue retrieval of it. Cued recall is often contrasted to free recall, which mainly refers to the process of retrieving information from...