JOURNAL OF VERBAL LEARNING AND VERBAL BEHAVIOR 17, 1--12 (1978) Recall of Previously Unrecallable Information following a Shift in Perspective

College undergraduates read a story about two boys playing hooky from school from the perspective of either a burglar or a person interested in buying a home. After recalling the story once, subjects were directed to shift perspectives and then recall the story again. In two experiments, subjects produced on the second recall significantly more information important to the second perspective that had been unimportant tothe first. They also recalled less information unimportant to the second perspective which had been important to the first. These data clearly show the operation of retrieval processes independent from encoding processes. An analysis of interview protocols suggested that the instruction to take a new perspective l d subjects to invoke a schema that provided implicit cues for different categories of story information. It has been known since the turn of the century that the important elements of a prose passage are more likely to be learned and remembered than the unimportant elements (Binet & Henri, 1894; Thieman & Brewer, in press). Recent years have seen increasingly precise formulations of the notion of import-ance in terms of story schemata (Mandler &amp