ABSTRACT
Chapters 8 and 9 describe more experiments which employed various forms of experimenter intervention. Such intervention is appropriate since uncued performance offers little indication that these subjects can organise spontaneously in such a way as to increase amount recalled. While a statistically significant degree of clustering may occur, it does not appear to affect amount recalled. Furthermore this seems to be a consistent finding. Performance on the no cues control conditions by subjects of higher vocabulary age (VA) in Experiment 7 and in Experiment 9, for instance, are remarkably similar. Although there were differences in these experiments (e.g. presentation by means of cards in Experiment 9 as opposed to the projected presentation of Experiment 7), nevertheless mean clustering (O-E) was 1.04 and 1.19 respectively, and mean recall 10.14 and.9.80. Even the subjects of considerably lower VA also employed in experiment 7 did not differ markedly in their non-cued performance; their mean clustering score was 1.00 and their mean recall score 9.41. In all cases the percentage of maximum possible clustering obtained was low (never above 20%). This failure to organise spontaneously to any appreciable extent does not, however, justify a deficiency inference. Rather, it suggests the importance of exploring different modes of intervention in an effort significantly to induce performance above this level.
