ABSTRACT
In 1894 Kirkpatrick reported the results of an experimental study of memory for spoken words, printed words, and real objects. Using what would be much later called an RTT procedure, Kirkpatrick presented lists often items, followed by an immmediate free recall test and a second test some 72 hours later. There were 329 subjects, male and female students from elementary school through university. Although some details of his experimental design and procedure would not get by a contemporary editor or reviewer (e.g., failure to counterbalance materials and test orders) the results were striking and impressive, as Fig. 3.1 indicates. There was the by-now familiar superiority in recall of objects over words in immediate recall, and a positively huge difference after the 72-hour retention interval. If the antiquity of this study makes the reader uneasy, the results of a replication of Kirkpatrick’s experiment by Calkins (1898) are reassuring: Using a sample of 50 college women, Calkins reproduced all of Kirkpatrick’s effects, including the apparent interaction of modality and retention interval, with recall of words declining by 50% or more over the retention interval, and recall of objects dropping by less than 20%.
