Immediate recall as a function of degree of organization and length of study period.

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Abstract
Two groups of subjects were made familiar with a small inventory of nonsense syllables. They were later intensively trained in various rules of organization, each set of rules progressively limiting the syllables which could appear. Organizational arrangements (which may be thought of as "artificial languages") ranged from random order (high rate of information) to high organization (low rate of information). Subjects then tried to memorize a series of experimental passages over a succession of study periods from 1 minute to 20 minutes in length. It was found that subjects could recall more information from material of lower degree of organization than from material of higher degree of organization (a finding in conformance with results reported earlier). However, different amounts of information were recalled from each degree of organization (a finding contradictory to the constancy in information recalled from lower degrees of organization reported earlier). More intensive training of the subjects, far from bringing about a constancy in information recalled from every passage, increased the recall differences among the various degrees of organization. The recall differences themselves seem to follow a predictable trend: the amount of information recalled per unit of study time decreases as the length of study time increases. Furthermore, the "loss" is percentagewise the same for all degrees of organization.

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