Forgetting and Remembering in Free Recall: Intentional and Unintentional '

Two free recall experiments were designed to study the processes by which 5s remember some items and forget others. In both experiments, 5s were cued immediately after each word in a list whether to remember (R word) or to forget (F word) that word. After each of six such lists, 5s were asked to recall the R words and to avoid recalling the F words; in general, 5s were remarkably able to do both. At the end of the experiment, 5s were asked, without forewarning, to recall any and all R words and F words they could remember. In Exp. I, final recall of F words was very poor: they seemed not to be in memory. In Exp. II, which employed categorized lists, 5s recalled F words quite well given that there were R words in the same semantic category. The results suggest that the differential rehearsal devoted to R words operates primarily on retrieval rather than on storage.