Results suggested that: cue encoding leads to greater associative recall; there was no difference in likelihood of associative recall between items encoded in a stable manner and items encoded in an unstable manner; and encouraging to encode cues did not facilitate associative recall. (Authors)

Using 48 educable mentally handicapped students (ages 12-18) as subjects, a study investigated the effect of prompted and trial-and-error procedures on the learning of a paired-associate task, when items (concrete nouns of less than six letters) in one list were drawn from the same categories (animals, food) and in a second list, from different…