The Recall of Affirmative and Negative Sentences in an Incidental Learning Task

This experiment examined the recall of positive and negative information in an incidental learning task. The two main findings were that a significantly greater number of affirmative than negative clues were correctly recalled and that the majority of errors took the form of conversions from negative to affirmative, independently of meaning. The difficulty associated with the negative clues was explained in terms of their inappropriateness in the situation, namely in the absence of any prior expectations.