The Influence Of The Items’ Representation Strength On Part-list Cuing Effect

The presentation of a subset of studied items as retrieval cues can havedetrimental effects on recall of the remaining item. This phenomenon is the so-calledpart-list cuing effect. Generation mechanism of part-list cuing effect hypothesis isnumerous, but two hypothesis received more and more attention——the strategydisruption hypothesis and the retrieval competition hypothesis. The strategydisruption hypothesis suggests that providing part-list cues disrupts participants’subjective retrieval plans and thus makes the retrieval of the noncue items lessefficient. however, the retrieval competition hypothesis proposes that the presentationof part-list cues strengthens these items’ memory representation strength so that,during attempts to recall the target items at test, the higher representation strength ofthe cue items leads subjects to covertly retrieve cue items before noncue items,resulting in a retrieval competition bias for cue items, impairing the retrieval ofnoncue items.In two experiments cue items’ representation strength was manipulated bycontrolling the time of learning of the same cue items (Experiment1) or was inducedthrough different types of cue items (Experiment2). In all two experiments reliablepart-list cuing effect arose in all experimental groups and the effect increase as cueitems representation strength increased. Moreover, we found when providing part-listcues don’t disrupts participants’ subjective retrieval plans, the part-list cue effect stillarose.In short, the experiment results support the retrieval competition hypothesis’prediction, and is inconsistent with the strategy disruption hypothesis’ speculation.However, the strategy disruption suggests that participant organized for material isrational in the learning phase.