Session instrument
Free recall and recognition
Recall
Measures: What was left afterwards, and what evaporated from the middle
It measures the price your interface charges the memory of the people who use it. A screen that only works when the person remembers charges dearly; the version based on recognition does the same job for free, and this test shows the difference in numbers.
Two well-known curves appear almost every time. The first is the serial position curve: items from the beginning and the end are remembered well above those from the middle (Murdock Jr.Measured the serial position effect in free recall: the beginning and the end of a list survive, the middle vanishes.One reference in this work:1962The serial position effect of free recallSee in the bibliography →, 1962), which is to say the middle of a list, a form or an onboarding is where information evaporates. The second is the Von RestorffMeasured, in 1933, that the odd item in a list is remembered better than the alike ones. The isolation effect bears her name.One reference in this work:1933Über die Wirkung von Bereichsbildungen im SpurenfeldSee in the bibliography → effect: the item that stands out from the set is remembered above the position it occupies. Running both measures separates out the question that matters, because recognising is much easier than remembering. It is the field version of what this site’s memory pages describe from the inside.
How to run itAfter the task, and without having warned them beforehand, ask the person to list everything they remember. Then offer a list with true and false items and ask them to tick the ones they saw. The gap between the two measures is the bill.
SeesIt shows where information evaporates and distinguishes remembering from recognising.
Does not seeSensitive to order and to the interval: without standardising both, the groups are not comparable.