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CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST

CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST OF MEMORY RECALL

PERFORMANCE

Mahratun Tanha

North South University

Abstract

According to theories, the presence of cues helps to recall knowledge quickly, and the absence of

cues may result in the inability to recollect knowledge. This research tries to test whether or not

the theory is accurate. It was expected that participants would recall more accurately and more

quickly when memory cues were present compared to when they were absent. A participant was

provided with flashcards containing the names of 20 countries (with and without cues) and was

asked to remember the capitals of these countries. The results of this experiment indicate the

theory's accuracy as the participant took less time while answering the ones with a cue.
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CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST

CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST OF MEMORY RECALL PERFORMANCE

Memory refers to the psychological processes of accumulating, storing, maintaining, and

retrieving information. Encoding, storage, and retrieval comprise memory's three primary

activities. Memory capability comprises the ability to store and retrieve information. This method

is imperfect, however. People occasionally forget or misremember things. In other circumstances,

incorrect encoding prevents the initial storage of data in memory. Retrieval, an essential aspect of

memory, effectively places stored information and brings it to conscious awareness when needed.

In other words, specific information from long-term memory storage is extracted throughout the

retrieval process. Frequently, retrieval cues serve as guides when attempting to retrieve

information from long-term memory (Ackerman, 1987).

Memory cues are objects or events that can be utilized to initiate an action or stimulate a memory

of that action. The cued recall involves retrieving information from long-term memory with the

aid of cues or other prompts. Any external stimuli connected to the data that has to be remembered

(the goal) can serve as a cue (Aue, Criss, & Fischetti, 2012). Examples include words, phrases,

incomplete images, symbols inside words, and many more. These cues can be unintentional, such

as a product at the grocery that prompts us to remember something we did not include on our

grocery list, or they can be something we intentionally set up beforehand, like a phone reminder.

The current paper's main goal was to determine whether cues help to remind faster and more

accurately. The experiment that has been done here on a 21-year-old girl illustrates that cued

materials assist in recalling things comparatively more quickly than non-cued materials.
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CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST

Methods

Participants

A 21 years old adult female took part in this experiment. She is an undergraduate student at North

South University. She was chosen as she is a friend of the experimenter. The participant was

offered a cup of coffee during the experiment.

Materials

Twenty flashcards containing twenty country names were provided. Cards with even numbers had

cues; the others (odd-number cards) did not. A mobile phone stopwatch determined the time to

answer each card. The softcopy of the flashcards is given below:

Procedure

The procedure started by taking the participant's consent through a consent form. Then one card

was provided at a time to the participant. She was asked to name the capitals of the countries

written on each card. The cards with even numbers had the cues, and the cards with odd numbers

had no cues. The time she took to remember each capital was recorded separately. It was done to

compare the average recall time between cued cards and non-cued cards. The participant was

debriefed after the experiment was done.

Results

The number of correct recall and response times in the presence and absence of cues is given

below:

Correct Answer (cued): 09 out of 10.

Correct Answer (non-cued): 05 out of 10.

Average Response Time (cued): (5+11+2+5+11+2+4+4.5+6+3)/10 = 5.35

Average Response Time (non-cued): (7+6+28+15+2+1.5+8+3+5+2)/10 = 7.75

There were ten cued flashcards and ten non-cued flashcards. The response times for cued

flashcards are added and divided by ten to determine the average response time. The same has

been done with the non-cued ones. The average response time is calculated to compare two

situations (cued and non-cued).

Discussion

From the results, it is evident that cued recall is more accurate and faster than non-cued recall. This

experiment aimed to analyze the difference between cued and non-cued recall. The participant

could answer 9 out of 10 questions with cues. Nevertheless, she only answered 5 out of 10

questions without cues. This shows that cues help to remember something more correctly. The

average response time for cued cards is less than that for non-cued cards.

This experiment supports the hypothesis that cues help an individual to recall something quicker

and almost correctly. Cued recall is a stunning process of remembering small and significant things

in daily life. Cued recall should be helpful for neuropsychological assessments of enduring

memory and learning capacity. The process of cued recall helps in bringing up details from long-

term memory. Cues can be any external stimuli that connect to the information that has to be

remembered (the target), including words, sentences, incomplete images, letters inside words, and

many more (Buschke, 1984). A piece of information stored in memory long ago could be

challenging to remember when needed. Cues do not always have to be specific or given.

Ambiguous cues help when an individual cannot recall something (Fey et al.,2016).

There were some limitations in implementing the experiment. The stopwatch may have been

paused only a few times, which has caused slight differences in the answer sheet. The average

response time could have been one or two seconds more or less. The experimenter has forgotten

to record the time on the data sheet one or two times. This may have caused changes in results too.

However, the current result supports the hypothesis regardless of the limitations.

Cues could be both external. Here in this experiment, external cues have been used to perform the

experiment. However, there are also internal cues. For example, in order to cue retrieval of a target,

individuals may be asked to consider what they were thinking, their emotions, or the
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CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST

spatiotemporal context at the moment they met it (Hingham & Guzel, 2012). The performance of

recall with signals congruent with the target's encoding was superior to that of free recall (Roediger

& Payne, 1983). Cued recall is intended to provide a more precise differentiation between memory

impairments caused by contemporaneous variables and those caused by the neurodegenerative

process. Cued recall process helps patients who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In the

early identification of Alzheimer's disease, a cued recall test that eliminates the ceiling effect is at

least as practical as delayed-free recall tests (Ivanoiu et al., 2005).

This experiment was meant to determine whether theories about cued recall are correct. Memory-

stored information inhibits the recall of other memory-stored information (Feldman, 2018).

Nonetheless, cues help recall information from the brain faster and quicker. Through this

experiment, it can be concluded that the hypothesis about the cued recall has been proven to be

true.
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CUED RECALL: A PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST

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