ABSTRACT
Learning a list of items and recalling this list at a later point in time are nearly universal, common everyday occurrences. It is perhaps for this reason that word list learning tasks have an extremely long history of use in neuropsychology and have become a central tool in the neuropsychologist's armamentarium for evaluation of human memory functioning. In addition to having good ecological validity, word list learning tasks lend themselves nicely to the study of a number of aspects of memory functioning, including learning, retention, recall, and recognition. Numerous performance indexes have been derived and developed in cognitive psychology and clinical neuropsychology to evaluate each of these components of memory functioning.
