The influence of perceptual organizing responses on recall

This study was designed to explicate the results of a previous study conducted by Tresselt & Mayzner (1960) on incidental learning. Their Ss were administered one of three tasks which were designed to elicit different perceptual organizing responses on a list of 100 words. The performance of Ss on a test of free recall of the words were clearly influenced by the tasks. These results were interpreted to be in support of the hypothesis that learning is a function of the type of organizing response made. However, the results were possibly confounded by the total time the words were studied, since Ss in each task worked at their own rate. This experiment followed the method used by Tresselt and Mayzner with a control for total time of study. An analysis of these results confirmed the interpretation of Tresselt and Mayzner. The implications were discussed.