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Appendix D
Pilot Study 3: Recall Clusters
Purpose: To study the semantics of ownership using free
recall, the plan was to obtain recall lists of exemplars of
things that were owned and things that were not owned.
These listings were to be used as stimuli for judgement
tasks of the relevance of a set of plausable criteria of
ownership. Two questions concerning free recall had to be
answered. First, could subjects generate exemplars of
things they did not own? No literature could be found
concerning the free recall of negatively defined categories.
Secondly, would short recall lists, only 10 items long, be
unrepresentative either because they encompassed only one
recall cluster or because early recall RELATE ‘were
atypical? To answer these questions, a pilot study was
needed to check that subjects could indeed generate
exemplars of things they did not own, that recall clusters
in the first 10 items were small, and that recall items in a
10 item list were representative of the category.
Method: Sixty-eight part-time students from an evening
introductory psychology course made 2-minute free recall
listings of each of the following categories: Animals, What
You Own, Famous People, and What You Do Not Own. After
completing all of the recall listings, subjects then were