Rejoinder to Spanos, Bertrand, and Perlini.

In the early 1970s, Kihlstrom and Evans reported that hypnotizable subjects who remembered at least some of the items in a standardized hypnotic susceptibility scale, despite a suggestion for complete amnesia, tended not to recall these items in the order in which they had been administered; insusceptible subjects, by contrast, tended to recall the items sequentially (Evans & Kihlstrom, 1973; Kihlstrom & Evans, 1971). Sometime later, Spanos and Bodorik (1977), following up on an earlier unsuccessful study by Coe and his colleagues (Coe, Taul, Basden, & Basden, 1973), obtained a strong disruption in category clustering in a group of hypnotic subjects, but not in unhypnotized subjects who had received task-motivation suggestions for amnesia. They concluded, "the results of the present study support Evans and Kihlstrom's (1973) contention that suggested amnesia involves a temporary breakdown of the organizational strategy used by subjects to aid recall" (p. 302). Recently, Wilson and Kihlstrom (1986) attempted a conceptual replication of Spanos's own findings by using a 16-item wordlist, but they failed to find evidence of disorganized clustering during amnesia. Spanos, Bertrand, and Perlini (1988) take our 1986 experiment to task on a number of grounds. Furthermore, in a personal communication (March 5, 1987) Spanos has provided us with a draft manuscript (Spanos, Perlini, and Bertrand, 1987) that repeats the essential criticisms, generalizes them to another of our studies (dealing with subjective organization rather than category clustering), and reports an experiment in which they have been able to replicate their earlier work with a 16-item list. Although we have no quarrel with the empirical findings of Spanos, Perlini, and Bertrand (1987), we take issue with their assertion that our major analyses "failed to correctly test for the disorganized clustering effect" (Spanos et al., 1988, p. 378; see also Spanos, Perlini, & Bertrand, 1987, pp. 3-4). This assertion is simply incorrect, and just one of the ways in which they misrepresent and misinterpret both our findings and their own. Spanos et al. (1988) argue that proper tests of the disorganiza-