Revisiting the multi-mechanism hypothesis of part-list cuing: the role of list-length and item presentation time

When defining the associative encoding, the multi-mechanism hypothesis of part-list cuing does not heed the effect of list length and item presentation time. Through four experiments, this study first proved that short list length and long item presentation time were the boundary conditions of the part-list cuing effects (Experiment 1). Then, it was further found that under a shorter list length, no matter whether the study context was accessed or not, both the detrimental and beneficial effects of part-list cuing were absent (Experiment 2). While under a longer list length and shorter item presentation time, when access to the study context was maintained, part-list cuing impaired recall and when context access was impaired, part-list cuing facilitated memory retrieval (Experiment 3). Finally, adopting a simplified experimental paradigm, the stability of significant detrimental and beneficial effect in Experiment 3 was further verified (Experiment 4). The findings showed that the effects of part-list cuing have boundary conditions, that is, the impairment and facilitation effect of part-list cuing are constrained by list length and item presentation time, which is a key supplement to the multi-mechanism hypothesis about when the impairment and facilitation effect occurs.