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Rehearsal and Memory

Rehearsal refers to the overt or subvocal recitation of to-be-remembered (TBR) verbal material during encoding, storage, or retrieval from memory. This entry reviews the considerable evidence that rehearsal is a major determinant of memory performance in many situations, involving both short-term and long-term retention. Rehearsal has played an explanatory role in otherwise highly diverse theories of memory, for example that of Alan Baddeley. In recognition of the potential circularity of an unobservable explanatory construct (e.g., whenever memory performance is good, there must have been effective rehearsal, and whenever performance is poor, rehearsal must have been absent), much effort has focused on the identification, operationalization, and experimental control of rehearsal.

Elaborative versus Maintenance Rehearsal

One influential proposal involved the distinction between elaborative rehearsal (also known as Type II rehearsal) and maintenance (Type I) rehearsal advanced by Fergus Craik: During elaborative rehearsal, new material is meaningfully related to other information—for example, by deciding whether a TBR word fits into a sentence. Maintenance rehearsal, by contrast, involves rote repetition of items without relational processing, usually with the express purpose to maintain already encoded information in awareness.

There is consensus that increasing elaboration of TBR material leads to better long-term retention; for example, judgments involving the meaning of the TBR material lead to better subsequent recall than judgments of its sound, which in turn yields better memory than judgments of surface structure (e.g., reporting the number of letters). By contrast, the effect of maintenance rehearsal is more ambiguous: On the one hand, when people are led to believe that long-term retention of the material is unimportant, the number of overt recitations of TBR words is often unrelated to subsequent surprise recall performance. On the other hand, when memory is tested by recognition, the duration of maintenance rehearsal is usually correlated with performance, as shown by Robert Greene in an extensive review. The distinction between maintenance and elaborative rehearsal might therefore be best considered as a continuum involving the amount of attention that is paid to rehearsal. When attention is minimal, then the number of rehearsals may fail to correlate with measures of memory. In all other situations, the number of articulations of TBR material is correlated with enhanced performance.

Linking Rehearsal to Performance

Going beyond mere correlation, support for a causal link between rehearsal patterns and memory performance has been adduced both empirically and theoretically. Lydia Tan and Geoff Ward provided a detailed analysis of rehearse-out-loud protocols in free-recall experiments. In immediate free recall, performance at all list positions was primarily a function of the recency of an item's last rehearsal, to the exclusion of other experimental variables (e.g., presentation rate, list length, and participants’ age) that affect recall when rehearsal patterns are ignored. It follows that those other variables exert their effect on performance only indirectly, via modulation of people's rehearsal patterns. It is noteworthy that the recency-of-rehearsal analysis accommodated the primacy effect (better recall for items that were presented early in the list), because early items tended to be rehearsed again much later in the list. In delayed recall, other factors such as the number and spacing of rehearsals become relatively more important than recency, and those factors may also explain why maintenance rehearsal is sometimes ineffective.

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