A further examination of relational and item-specific processing effects on cued recall hypermnesia

Previous studies in a laboratory showed that in cued recall, relational processing produces a greater hypermnesic effect than item-specific processing does. However, in those studies, relational processing also resulted in a lower level of performance. The present experiment examined two item-specific processing tasks that were designed to produce a lower level of performance than the relational processing task. One hundred college students processed 60 word pairs, using either a relational or item-specific processing task. The relational processing task was a category-sorting task. The three item-specific processing tasks were pleasantness rating, rhyme rating, and vowel counting. As expected, the rhyme-rating and vowel-counting tasks produced lower performance than the relational processing task did. However, the hypermnesic effect was greater for the relational processing than for the item-specific processing conditions. It was concluded that in cued recall, relational processing does produce a greater hypermnesic effect than item-specific processing does.