Text memory and integration at different times of day

✍ Scribed by Jane Oakhill

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 626 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/acp.2350020306

✦ Synopsis

This paper reports an experiment that explored whether the extent to which the ideas in a text are integrated changes over the day. In order to monitor integration, a task used by Wilkes, Alred and Al-Ahmar (1983) was adopted. The assumption underlying the task was that information that is inconsistent with respect to preceding information in a text will be remembered differently from information that is not inconsistent. Obviously, such selective remembering cannot occur if the information in the text is not integrated, so the degree to which differential remembering occurs can be taken as an index of degree of integration. Although the predicted differences in degree of integration between morning and afternoon subjects were not confirmed, the morning superiority effect in text recall was replicated, and it was demonstrated that this superiority arose because of the morning subjects' better memory for the exact wording of the text. In addition, subjects showed different types of recall error at the two times of day. These errors are discussed in relation to subjects' hypothesized changes in strategy over the day.