Contingent dissociation between recognition and fragment completion: the method of triangulation.

Two experiments conforming to the logic of the method of triangulation were conducted. Following the study of a list of words, the first of two successive tests (recognition) was identical for two groups of subjects, but the second one, in which the same word-fragment cues were presented to both groups, differed with respect to retrieval instructions. Subjects in one group engaged in cued recall of study-list words, whereas those in the second group completed the fragments with the first word that came to mind. Both experiments yielded the same result: The dependency between the first and second tests, indexed by Yule's Q statistic, was greater for recognition and cued recall than it was for recognition and fragment completion. These results speak to the controversial issue of the usefulness of contingency analyses of data from successive memory tests. The results are interpreted in a theoretical framework consisting of an integration of the idea of a hypothetical quasi-memory system with the transfer-appropriate procedural approach.