What Do We Know about What We Cannot Remember? Accessing the Semantic Attributes of Words that Cannot be Recalled

Two experiments examined access to the semantic attributes of words that participants failed to retrieve. The results indicated access to all 3 dimensions of the semantic differential - evaluation, potency, and activity, as revealed by attribute judgments and by the nature of the commission errors made. There was no evidence for superior access to the emotional-evaluative dimension, inconsistent with what may be expected from the claimed primacy of emotion. In comparison with complete recall, partial recall exhibited a slower rate of forgetting and a stronger tendency to elicit know rather than remember responses. The results were discussed in terms of the processes that lead to partial recall and in terms of the possibility that the affective primacy hypothesis does not apply to memory retrieval.