Free recall

Recall is the mind's ability to use cues in the stream of consciousness to attend to information already processed and bring it into awareness. In free recall, an individual attends to previously processed stimuli (i.e. words, sounds, numbers, etc) and uses subjective organization to retrieve the memories in categories. George A. Miller wrote a widely known paper describing the limitations of memory and the power of categories to improve recall, especially in short-term memory. He popularized the short term memory limitation by calling it the "Magic Number 7 plus or minus 2". Two of the most studied components of short term memory are the primacy and end recency effects, where people when using free recall will recall more items from the beginning and the end of a list than from the middle. Other phenomena are proactive inhibition and retroactive inhibition.

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References

Miller, George A(rmitage) (1956). "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". The Psychological Review 63: 81-97.