Forgetting and remembering in free recall: Intentional and unintentional.

Two free recall experiments were designed to study the processes by which 5s remember some items and forget others. In both experiments, 5s were cued immediately after each word in a list whether to remember (R word) or to forget (F word) that word. After each of six such lists, 5s were asked to recall the R words and to avoid recalling the F words; in general, 5s were remarkably able to do both. At the end of the experiment, 5s were asked, without fore-warning, to recall any and all R words and F words they could remember. In Exp. I, final recall of F words was very poor: they seemed not to be in memory. In Exp. II, which employed categorized lists, 5s recalled F words quite well given that there were R words in the same semantic category. The results sug-gest that the differential rehearsal devoted to R words operates primarily on retrieval rather than on storage. Our attempts to understand human memory as exhibited in the free recall para-digm tend to concentrate on the items S