Maintenance and generalization of a sorting and retrieval strategy by EMR and nonretarded individuals

Abstract

The ability of 47 EMR and 51 nonretarded individuals to maintain and generalize a sorting and retrieval strategy designed to facilitate recall and clustering was examined. Each of these two groups of subjects was assigned to one of three conditions: experimental, practice, or control. Only subjects in the experimental condition received strategy training. The three conditions were each further divided into two subconditions: superordinate and associative. The experimental task consisted of two phases: word elicitation and recall. The data showed that after a 6-month interval, the strategy was still maintained. Neither the far-generalization data that was provided by the word-elicitation phase nor the near-generalization data, obtained through the recall phase, however, revealed any significant results.