Exploring recognition hypermnesia: Variations on recognition test procedures

Hypermnesia is the increase in net recall obtained over time. The following research explored hypermnesia using recognition tests in which subjects decided whether each word had or had not been studied previously. There were four types of tests: (1) subjects made a single decision for each word, (2) subjects made multiple decisions, one after another, for each word, (3) subjects went through the test list more than once, each time making a single decision for a given word with their previous decisions in view, and (4) subjects were tested as in (3), except that their previous decisions were not in view. In Experiment 1, each subject received only one type of test, whereas in Experiments 2-4, subjects received the first type of test along with one other. No hypermnesia was observed. In fact, recognition performance decreased over trials when subjects did not see their previous responses.