[Effects of meaningful relations between not-to-be-memorized items upon selective memorization]

Forty-five students participated in a selective free recall experiment which was designed to examine the process of selective memorization. The following three conditions were utilized: U (unrelated) list condition, where there was no meaningful relation between any neighboring pair of items; NCR (no-cross-related) list condition, where there were meaningful relations between the neighboring not-to-be-memorized items, but not between the neighboring to-be-memorized and not-to-be-memorized items; CR (cross-related) list condition, where there were meaningful relations between the neighboring to-be-memorized and not-to-be-memorized items. The percentage of correct recall for the to-be-memorized items was smaller and the number of intrusion-errors was larger in the CR list condition than in the U and the NCR list conditions, while there was no difference between the U and the NCR list conditions in those indices. The percentage of correct recall for the not-to-be-memorized items in the NCR and the CR list conditions was larger than in the U list condition in the initial and the middle sections within the serial positions. The results suggested that the not-to-be-memorized items receive semantic analysis and are maintained in short-term memory and that they have the chance to be transformed into long-term memory irrespective of the type of their relations with the to-be-memorized items.