The study is to investigate if whether Ss recalled more critical items with fewer part-set cues. Psychology students were used from Manchester Metropolian University all in their first year of the course. They had to sit a questionnaire involving two recalls, it was the second recall that was being measured using a experimental control method, and using the independent t test to test the significance, which was p=0.012, meaning that the results were significant and that Ss presented with 15 part-set cues will recall fewer critical items, then Ss presented with 5 part-set cues.
             The nature of the study is to investigate the effects of part-set cuing (PSC) on recall, to see how the presentation of PSC affects the recall of the remaining list items.
             There have been a number of studies which have investigated the effects of PSC, and have suggested that PSC can both increase and decrease the number of items recalled. These studies can suggest that the use of cues can either be helpful, or completely useless.
             Tulving and Pearlstone (1966), for example presented Ss with a list of 48 words, comprising of 12 categories, each containing 4 words: 4 birds, 4 sports, 4 forms of transport etc. during recall half the Ss were presented with the category headings (cues), and the other half of the Ss were not presented with any cues at all. Results showed that Ss presented with the cues recalled on average 30 words out of 48, and the non-cue group recalled 20 words on average out of 48. these findings do suggest that the use of cues can increase recall. Tulving and Pearlstone reinforced these findings, when they presented the non-cue group with the cues, and found they were able to recall eight more words, which they did know but were unable to retrieve. This was due to the failure of the long term memory (LTM), and how sometimes if we are unable to recall something, it does come back to us later, but in Tulving and Pearlstone's study the use...