RECOGNITION FAILURE OF CATEGORIZED WORDS - FURTHER EVIDENCE OF EXCEPTIONS

When subjects study a list of B items paired with A items and are test ed for recognition of the B items alone, and then for recall of the B items given the A items as cues, B items that can be recalled frequent ly go unrecognised. The extent of this recognition failure is predicta ble from a function discovered by Tulving and Wiseman (1975), which re lates the probability of recognising the recallable items to the proba bility of recognising all items. Two kinds of exceptions to this funct ion have been discovered: encoding exceptions and retrieval exceptions . Very few observations of retrieval exceptions exist. Four experiment s described in this article provide further evidence that such excepti ons occur when the B items are categorised and the A items are the nam es of the categories. According to a contextual account of the functio n and exceptions to it, these retrieval exceptions occur because the i nformation provided by the A-item cues can be largely retrieved from t he B items in the recognition test; hence, as cues, the A items do not provide much different contextual information to that provided by the B items. By this account, the function is an empirical law; exception s fall outside the range of this law and define its boundary condition s.