Hypermnesia for prose.

Hypermnesia is an improvement in memory that occurs with repeated testing. In the present experiment, hypermnesia was examined with prose materials. Participants were presented with either a fairy tale or an expository passage, followed by 3 free-recall tests. Participants used 1 of 2 encoding strategies (the relational or item-specific processing conditions) to process the material, or they simply read the material (the read-only condition). Recall performance improved across the 3 tests in the relational and item-specific processing conditions. No improvement was found in the read-only condition.