Reciprocal dissociations between subjective organization and hypermnesia

Abstract

This investigation examines the relationship between hypermnesia, significant retrieval increments across trials, and subjective organization (SO), which consists in adjacently grouping nominally unrelated stimuli. Davis and Dominowsky (1986) claim that SO promotes hypermnesia; however, we suggest that their results merely reflect a correlation, not a causal relationship between these phenomena. We used a four group between participant design. Two groups studied words, the other two studied pictures. Our results suggests: (1) picture recall significantly higher than word recall; (2) consistent hypermnesia for pictures but not for words; however, (3) very high SO for words, but not for pictures. We obtained reciprocal dissociations between both phenomena. These results suggest that SO does not generate hypermnesia, these phenomena only correlate positively. We compare our results to those of Payne and Wenger (1992), who report equivalent SO among words, pictures and Socratic stimuli. Our results are interpreted with ARP, the alternative retrieval pathways hypothesis (v. gr., Solís-Macías, 1998, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c).