Anushka Maity, MS Research Student 

Anushka Maity, MS Research Student, guided by Dr Vishnu Sreekumar authored an article on the differences between cue efficacy and target retrievability in cued recall memory tasks. This article was published in the journal Cognition by Science Direct. 

Memorability is often treated as an intrinsic property of stimuli. Some words, images, or concepts are thought to be consistently more memorable than others, regardless of who is doing the remembering. Anuska Maity, an MS by research student in the lab who defended her thesis earlier this month, is the first author of this paper. 

Memorability, the tendency for an item to be consistently remembered across individuals, is often treated as an intrinsic property of stimuli, reflecting fixed characteristics of items themselves. However, models of cue-based retrieval predict that memorability should also depend on the functional role an item plays during retrieval. Using a large cued-recall dataset in which each word served both as a cue and as a target, the research student tested this prediction directly. Cue memorability showed substantially greater cross-participant reliability than target memorability, indicating that the cognitive processes initiating retrieval are more consistent across individuals than those involved in recovering specific memory traces. To identify the sources of this dissociation, the student modelled cue and target memorability using a broad set of psycholinguistic and semantic features. Number of senses, concreteness, and word frequency selectively supported cue effectiveness, whereas number of incoming associates and morphemic complexity predicted target retrievability However, at the level of semantic categories, cue and target memorability converged almost perfectly, consistent with Aka et al. (2023). This result suggests that category-level structure captures stable conceptual regularities that shape memorability across retrieval roles. Together, these findings suggest that memorability reflects an interaction between semantic structure and retrieval processes, with distinct lexical and semantic properties supporting the effectiveness of items as cues versus their retrievability as targets.

Link to the journal:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027726001599

June 2026