Comparing Cue and Target Roles in Cued Recall Reveals Limits of Intrinsic Word Memorability

Despite individual differences, certain stimuli are consistently remembered more than others, a phenomenon known as memorability and traditionally viewed as an intrinsic property of the stimulus. However, recent findings by Aka et al. (2023) challenge this view, reporting weak correlations in word-level memorability between free recall and recognition tasks. To investigatefurther, we examined whether word memorability remains stable across functional roles within a single task, specifically cued recall, by comparing each word’s effectiveness as a cue to its retrievability as a target. Using a large cued-recall dataset, we found that some words consistently served as more effective cues across participants. Cue efficacy also showed higher internalreliability than target retrievability, suggesting that applications relying on cue memorability may be more robust. Critically, the correlation between a word’s memorability as a cue and as a target was weaker than the internal split-half reliability within each role, indicating that memorability dependson a word’s functional role even within the same task. Lexical properties such as context diversity and morphemic structure predicted target retrievability, whereas concreteness selectively enhanced cue efficacy. Finally, we replicated and extended the findings of Aka et al. (2023), showing that althoughword-level memorability is not stable across roles, semantic category-level memorability generalizes more reliably, yet still reflects role-specific patterns. These results challenge the view of memorability as an intrinsic word-level property and emphasize the role of task demands and semantic structure indetermining what is remembered.