TWO COMPONENTS IN FREE RECALL

It is now widely believed that in the short-term retention of verbal material, both primary memory (PM) and secondary memory (SM) mechanisms are involved. In the experiments reported here an attempt was made to separate the PM and SM components in immediate free recall. The first experiment showed that neither age nor the size of set from which words were drawn affected the size of the PM component but that both factors affected retrieval from SM. The second experiment showed that word length affected neither the PM nor the SM component. It was concluded that PM stores a constant number of words regardless of word length.