A match made in mental space: Alignment between target skew and cue organization influences recall of attribute values

Abstract Recall is often more successful for items from sparse (distinct) regions and less successful from dense (less distinct) regions in memory space. We propose that retrieval cues are also organized into crowded and less crowded regions depending on distinctiveness, and that successful retrieval depends on the distributional match between the organization of targets and cues. As a real-world test case, we used the labels from the European Union’s old (A+++, A++, A+, A, B, C, D) and new (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) energy-label scale as cues for memory retrieval of appliances’ kilowatt-hour (kWh) values. In a preregistered experiment, participants rated seven refrigerators, while studying associated kWh values drawn from a positive, a negative, or a non-skewed distribution. Ratings confirmed that the labels of the old scale were psychologically skewed in mental space whereas the new scale had a more linear organization. After a brief filled delay, labels served as retrieval cues for kWh recall. Analyses of recall patterns, complemented by analyses of recall error, showed that the linear cue scale yielded recalled values that were closer to the correct kWh values when target values were non-skewed, but recalled values were overly linear when targets were skewed. Conversely, recall was most successful with the skewed cue scale when target values were positively skewed. These findings suggest that retrieval cues constrain reconstruction by imposing a distributional structure on target representations, and that recall is most successful when this structure aligns with the organization of encoded values in mental space.