Topicalization Effects in Memory for Technical Prose

摘要

The perceived topic of a passage should determine what information is given priority in storage effort for later recall. The topic should also determine how effective a later recall cue should be, in that recall should be best if the cue is the same as the passage topic. These issues were studied by investigating cued recall of passages that contained information about two candidate topics, either of which could be marked as the passage topic by initial mention or the sentence surface subject position. The recall cue either matched or mismatched the marked candidate topic. If the cue matched the topic, recall about the marked item was greater than recall about the unmarked item. If the cue mismatched the topic, recall about the two items was roughly the same, unaffected by the topic marking. But the matching and mismatching cues produced the same overall level of recall. In contrast to the original hypothesis, the results are interpreted as the topic marking and recall cue acting as instructions for what information the subject should emphasize in recall. It is argued that the two-topic passages used in this work are processed differently than the usual one-topic passages used in prose memory studies. (Author)