The work described below was among the first to present evidence that people (a) are variable in their strategy use, and (b) do not always attempt to search memory for a close match to the probe before electing to use some other type of question-answering strategy. Before this work was published, the accepted view was that memory would be searched for an answer before executing a "back-up" strategy such as computation or inference.

Lemaire, P. & Reder, L.M. (1999). What affects strategy selection in arithmetic? An examination of parity and five effects on product verification. Memory & Cognition, 27(2), 364-382. [download PDF]

Reder, L.M. (1988). Strategic control of retrieval strategies. In G. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 22, New York: Academic Press, pp.227-259. [download PDF]

Reder, L.M. (1987). Beyond associations: Strategic components in memory retrieval. In D. Gorfein & R. Hoffman (Eds.), Memory and learning: The Ebbinghaus Centennial Conference, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.203-220. [download PDF]

Reder, L.M. (1987). Strategy selection in question answering. Cognitive Psychology, 19(1), 90-138. [download PDF]

Reder, L.M. (1982). Plausibility judgments vs. fact retrieval: Alternative strategies for sentence verification. Psychological Review, 89, 250-280. [download PDF]