Free-Listed Items are Effective Cues for Eliciting Additional Items in Semantic Domains

This study tested a cueing procedure for enhancing recall in semantic domains based on associative processes inferred from semantic clustering. Participants first free listed items exhaustively from a semantic domain (fruits and drugs). Then, to aid recall of additional items from the domain, participants received either the items they free listed as semantic cues (to trigger semantically similar items) or alphabetic cues (to trigger items beginning with a particular letter). Clustering is perfomed by solving a number of instances of the symmetric traveling salesman problem to optimality.