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six stages, each of which will be described as a separate
sub-section of the results.
Equivalence of Recall Conditions
The first analysis was to determine whether or not the
two recall conditions (experimenter-present and
experimenter-absent) had any significant effect on the
recall listings. There was concern that the subjects who
did the recall tasks in the absence of the experimenter
might have performed differently, e.g. by either consulting
other people for exemplars or by doing the recall tasks in
several sittings. The null hypothesis was that there was no
difference in the recall listings. This was tested on eight
different measures. For listings of things owned and for
listings of things not owned, the two groups of subjects
were compared on the relative frequencies of the exemplars,
on the relative frequencies of the exemplar categories, on
the recall positions of the actual exemplars in the serial
recall order 1 to 10, and on the the recall positions of the
items in the exemplar categories. All comparisons were made
using the Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks Test of the
SPSS sub-program NPAR TESTS (Hull & Nie, 1981).
The first comparisons were of the actual exemplars that
had a recall frequency of at least two, i.e. exemplars
listed by more than one subject. It would not have been