ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how to characterize the organization that is observed with free recall of once-presented words. The main theoretical opposition that emerged from such clustering experiments was between a nested-hierarchy memory structure and a pairwise-associative structure. Probably all memory is organized, but it is no accident that theory on the organization of episodic memory has come largely from the free-recall method. Because order of recall is totally constrained in the serial and paired-associate learning methods the popularity of these methods waned somewhat starting in the early 1960s, when organization theory began receiving wide attention. The concept of dependent storage and the cuing technique of Slamecka have added a still more analytic approach to the organization of memory. Slamecka has proposed a truly radical alternative that items are stored independently of one another; SADISM and MASOCHISM, by this notion, are no more closely related in memory than are SADISM and CHICKADEE.
