For example, strengths between probe cues and the image sampled are increased after a successful recovery. So the probability of sampling a given image is proportional to its strength to the probe cues. The product rule ensures the sampled image is generally an item strongly connected to all cues, allowing the use of multiple cues to focus the memory search. At the start of free recall the only cue available is the context cue. Equations 3 to 8 describe what happens in a single cycle of a search.
Retrieval consists of a series of such cycles.
As in recognition, strong items will in general have greater activations than weak items. In recall this improves performance at both the sampling and recovery phases. The strong item is more likely to be sampled because its activation is a larger proportion of the total activation. The effect of list length occurs in the sampling phase. A longer list means a greater total activation which results in a smaller sampling probability.