A series of three experiments was reported in which attention was directed towards an assessment of the interference operating upon forward and backward associations. Evidence was found for direct and indirect interference in four transfer paradigms (A-B, A-D; A-B, C-B; A-B, D-A; and A-B, B-C). Failures of others to find indirect interference were attributed to their use of a high degree of original learning. The difficulty of the principle of associative symmetry to accommodate certain outcomes of the three experiments is also discussed.
Hypotheses offered to explain why retroactive inhibition occurs in free recall learning when categories are repeated in the two lists are: (a) List 1 items are unlearned during List 2 learning, or (6) the experimental group must recall from categories twice as large as those of the control group, and recall is therefore inefficient. This study compared the learning of eight-word categories in a long list with learning the same words in fourword categories in two successive lists. As the category-size hypothesis predicted, these groups scored alike when recalling all words learned. However, no adequate explanation other than unlearning was found for the loss of List 1 items specifically, rather than random losses.
The effect of different organizational instructions in free-recall learning on 5-7 day retention was studied in two experiments. In each study all subjects learned an identical list of words, with instructions and input blocking suggesting use of either subjective organization or else categorization, according to sensory-dominance categories; categorization was either linear or hierarchical. In both experiments, instructions to use categories led to superior retention. Differences in number of categories used by the subjects were considered as the primary explanation of the findings.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.