Components of Recall: The Semantic Specificity Effect and the Monitoring of Cued-Recall

Using forced report to control response bias in cued recall, Higham (2002) showed that, ironically, there was no clear evidence of encoding specificity in the classic “encoding specificity” paradigm of Thomson and Tulving (1970). However, he also showed that using type 2 signal detection theory methods to assess meta-memory in the Thomson and Tulving (1970) paradigm provided different evidence of encoding specificity related to the participants’ “monitoring” of retrievals. We applied the same approach to the closely-related “semantic specificity” paradigm and found semantic specificity effects on both free and forced cued-recall, and participants’ meta-memory.