Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

155 Recognition over Recall

Memory for recognizing things is better than memory for recalling things.

People are better at recognizing things they have previously experienced than recalling those things from memory. This is because recognition tasks provide memory cues that facilitate searching through memory. For example, it is easier to correctly answer a multiple-choice question than a short-answer question because multiple-choice questions provide a list of possible answers; the range of search possibilities is narrowed to the list of options, and the test taker only needs to recognize the correct answer.1

Recall memory is much harder to develop than recognition memory. Recall memory is attained through learning, usually involving some ...