Compare And Contrast Free Recall And Cued Recall

The Contrast of Free Recall and Cued Recall

Memory is a concept that has been looked at by many people within the psychological community for quite some time. When we talk about memory we are talking about process in which people encode, store and retrieve certain pieces information over time (). Encoding is when we take in certain forms of information and try to understand what we are perceiving. Once this is done we store the information we gathered so it can be accessed over periods of certain time. Lastly the retrieval stage is when we try to recall the information that we had previously stored. These three stages provide a basic outline to how we gather and maintain memory. However memory can be broken down into 3 separate sub categories that depends on the

Short term memory is when we hold a small amount of information that can accessed within seconds of gathering, after that the memory is usually lost. When we manage to gather the information and store it for a long periods of time, we consider this to be part of our long term memory. Our long term memory can then be recalled at time. Recall can happen either freely meaning that there is no cue for retrieval or it can occur when something assists you.

Over the years there have been many studies that tried to understand the process of recalling information. One of the more well-known studies within the field of psychology is the Magical Number Seven study by George Miller. In this study Miller explains that we can only maintain on average 5 to 9 pieces of information in our short term memory (). This article was one of first to explain the limited amount of knowledge we can store in out short term memory. However, there are multiple forms of recall and psychologist wanted to know which form (free or cued) provided the best chance of storing