IS RETRIEVABILITY GROUPING GOOD FOR RECALL

Most theories suppose that during unconstrained retrieval easy-to-retr ieve items will be accessed before hard-to-retrieve items. Recent free -recall studies have supported a different access order, the cognitive triage pattern, in which hard-to-retrieve items are accessed first. T he present experiments demonstrated that this pattern enhances total r ecall. In Experiments 1-3, clustering type measures of goodness of tri age (grouping output according to items' levels of retrievability) pre dicted total recall in children and adults. In Experiments 4 and 5, go odness-of-triage measures predicted total recall when they were derive d from on-line information about retrievability (error-success histori es), but not when they were derived from normative information about r etrievability (frequency and meaningfulness ratings).