Subjective and categorical organization of recall during posthypnotic amnesia.

Two experiments were performed to determine the fate of organization of recall during posthypnotic amnesia. In both studies, amnesia suggestions were administered to subjects of low, medium, and high hypnotic susceptibility who had learned a word list by the method of free recall while they were hypnotized. In Experiment 1, the words were unrelated to each other, and subjective o~aniTation was measured by raw and adjusted pair frequency (PF). In Experiment 2, the words were drawn from various taxonomic categories, and category clustering was measured by repetition ratio (RR), modified repetition ratio (MRR), and adjusted ratio of clustering (ARC). Compared to baseline levels, subjective organization and category clustering did not decrease reliably during the time the amnesia suggestion was in effect. Moreover, these aspects of strategic organization were not significantly correlated with the number of items recalled during amnesia. Both findings contrast with previous results concerning temporal organization of a word list memorized by the method of serial learning. The experiments suggest that the disruption of retrieval processes in posthypnotic amnesia may be limited to certain organizational schemes.