ABSTRACT
The research presented here focuses on some of the structural factors affecting spontaneous or unintentional recall. The investigation of this neglected phenomenon was carried out by means of a novel method in which both the encoding of a visual pattern and its recall by cues corresponding to some of its parts occurred under incidental conditions. The set of critical patterns was interspersed among a series of other shapes, with spontaneous recall occurring over relatively brief intervals. Experimental results indicated that the evocativeness of a cue was a function of such factors as the perceptual organization of the incidentally encoded whole, the structural attributes intrinsic to a cue itself, the characteristics of the series and figural relations between cues. Comparison of incidental encoding and spontaneous recall with their intentional counterparts revealed that the former may be far more sensitive to the influence of perceptual organization than the latter, providing an empirical basis for a psychological distinction between these two types of memory.
