Instructing an experimental subject to sort words into categories of his or her own choosing leads to excellent retention, even if the subject had not expected to be tested, implying that organization leads to learning. The better the organization system for items of information in memory, the more accessible the information is likely to be. Inherent retrieval limitations may exist in human memory. When someone else produces it, the name is recognized without difficulty. Hints or cues are often helpful, and indeed the process of recognition, under most circumstances, could be regarded as providing a particularly strong cue.
Mnemonics are additional cues to help retrieve the appropriate information.
The color names are first reduced to their initial letter, and these are then elaborated into a meaningful sentence, providing a sequential organization not present in the order of the color names themselves. Although studies of the role of organization in verbal memory come nearer to everyday life than the rote memory experiments, these studies nonetheless tend to rely on the rather artificial procedure of requiring subjects to remember strings of isolated words. The comprehension of language must depend on an individual's prior knowledge both of the language itself and of the characteristics of the world that the language is describing. The term semantic memory is used to refer to the system within which such knowledge of the world is stored. Forgetting Forgetting is the process through which information in memory becomes inaccessible, either because the information is no longer stored or because it is stored but is not at that time retrievable.