Organiza t ion as a De te rminan t of Par t - to -Whole Transfer Recall

Tulving (1966) reported part-to-whole negative transfer in free recall on unrelated words, suggesting that the subjective organization induced by the part list persevered and was nonoptimal for the whole list. The present study first replicated Tulving's result with singleword presentations, finding too that Ss clustered their whole-list recall according to old vs. new items (suggesting perseverance of prior organizations). Additional conditions were run in which the list-words were explicitly organized (grouped) for S, with the (forced) wholelist organization being compatible with the (forced) part-list organization. In these conditions with forced compatible organizations, part-to-whole transfer was highly positive compared to relevant control Ss. in Free