total time hypothesis in learning

The total time hypothesis, recall strategies, and memory for rapidly presented word strings

• Published: March 1974
• Volume 2 , pages 236–240, ( 1974 )

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• Sheila M. Pfafflin 1  

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In three experiments the free recall of rapidly presented word strings was studied. The word strings were shown either in grammatical order or a scrambled order. It was found that the invariance of recall with various presentation times for grammatical sequences breaks down at presentation times between 175 and 250 msec. The order of recall, however, remains consistent with the type of sequence presented irrespective of presentation time. The amount of time requked to utilize syntactic information fully in free recall is of approximately the same order of magnitude as that required to read the words.

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Sheila M. Pfafflin

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Pfafflin, S.M. The total time hypothesis, recall strategies, and memory for rapidly presented word strings. Memory & Cognition 2 , 236–240 (1974). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208989

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Received : 03 August 1973

Accepted : 27 August 1973

Issue Date : March 1974

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208989

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[Test strategies in evaluation of quantitative psychological hypotheses: the example of total learning time in learning of texts]

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In most textbooks on statistics and experimental design, the analysis of trend hypotheses is incomplete or at least not satisfactory from an hypothesis testing point of view. Quantitative psychological hypotheses usually predict that a particular trend component will be significant, while all other trends are expected to be absent. Only a conjunction of these two results, however, eventually confirms the psychological hypothesis. This fact is not addressed in popular textbooks, and so this article deals with some statistical testing strategies that can be used to examine functional psychological hypotheses via trend tests. Under some circumstances, however, the strategies discussed may fail when several psychological hypotheses are examined simultaneously. This failure can be avoided by adding a further test to the strategies which allows a comparison of predicted and actual correlations. The different strategies for testing trend hypotheses are then applied to the simultaneous examination of two simple quantitative psychological hypotheses which address the role of total presentation time and its pacing in text learning ("total-time hypothesis"). Although Bredenkamp (1975) has convincingly argued on a theoretical basis that the form most often encountered in the literature must be false, this variant has been discussed most often in various fields of psychology. Therefore, two experiments were planned and performed in which this well-known variant of the hypothesis is compared with a modification claiming a less steep linear function than the classical variant. The article shows how the necessary tests can be planned to prevent the cumulation of error probabilities from being too large. The experiments in which N = 180 and N = 216 students have to learn and recall until they have mastered a short prose passage, demonstrated convincingly that the classical form of the total-time hypothesis does not hold, whereas the modification can be regarded as confirmed.

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• “The total-time hypothesis states that a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material regardless of the number of individual trials into which that time is divided. If, for example, it takes 10 seconds to learn each of the items of a given list, the total-time hypothesis would predict that a subject could reach criterion in either 20 .5-second-per-item trials or 10 1-second per-item trials or 5 2-second-per-item trials or 1 10-second-per-item trial.” (Cooper & Pantle, 1967, p. 221).

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TEST OF THE TOTAL-TIME HYPOTHESIS IN FREE-RECALL LEARNING '

L. Postman , L. Warren

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Key Takeaway : The total-time hypothesis in free-recall learning holds true, regardless of list length and presentation rate, with gains related to list length and intertrial retention being invariant.

A test of the total-time hypothesis in free-recall learning is reported. The hypothesis asserts that the amount recalled is determined by the total presentation time (TPT), regardless of list length (LL) and rate of presentation (RP). The purpose of the experiment was to verify the validity of this principle and to examine some potential limitations on its operation. With TPT held constant at 60 sec., there were three conditions of presentation: (a) LL 20 and 3-sec. RP; (b) LL 30 and 2-sec. RP; (c) LL 60 and 1-sec. RP. A first test of recall was given either immediately after a single presentation of the list or after an interval of 20 min. The first test was followed by two additional study-test cycles. In accord with the hypothesis, the amount recalled on the first test was invariant across conditions after both retention intervals, i.e., the operation of the principle was found to be independent of delay. After the first test, gains as a function of practice were related directly to LL. The longer the list the more new items were added on each test, although intertrial retention was essentially invariant under the different treatments. The divergence of the learning curves is attributed to the covariation of LL and the amount of semantic and associative overlap among individual items. This study is concerned with the totaltime hypothesis in free-recall learning. The hypothesis asserts that the amount recalled is determined by the total presentation time (TPT), independently of the length of the list (LL) and the rate of presentation (RP) for individual items. As long as the product LL X RP is held constant, the number of items recalled is expected to be the same. This expectation was fully supported in an experiment by Murdock (1960) in which LL and RP were varied concomitantly while TPT remained unchanged. There were four combinations of LL and RP which yielded closely similar recall scores: 20-3 (a 20-word list presented at a rate of 3 sec. per item), 30-2, 40-1.5, and 60-1. In addition to the principle of recall invariance illustrated by these findings, Murdock (1960) advanced the hypothesis that the amount of recall is a linear function of TPT. We shall not consider further the latter hypothesis, which has been called into question by the results of subsequent investigations (Roberts, 1972; Waugh, 1967). Rather attention will be 1 This research was supported by Grant MH-12006

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