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Complex color photographs served as stimuli in an investigation of visual recognition memory. Increases in both stimulus duration (1 or 3 sec.) and in the unfilled (dark) interstimulus interval (2 or 6 sec.) led to improved performance in a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test. The superiority of recognition associated with increases in interstimulus interval duration suggest that, even for complex visual stimuli, poststimulus processing is important for subsequent retention.

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In 3 experiments each of a number of lists of paired associates was presented once and followed immediately by a stimulus probe test of 2 or 3 of the pairs. Sometimes the tested items conformed to transfer paradigms known to lead to retroactive inhibition in long-term memory tasks, in particular A-B, A-D or A-B, A-D, A-E. A commonly observed outcome was facilitated recall of A-B relative to that from an appropriate control paradigm. Substantial retroactive inhibition was never obtained. The thrust of the interpretation is that A-B was maintained or reinstated in a fixed-size rehearsal buffer by the presentation of interpolated pairs having the same stimulus.The series of experiments to be reported began with a fairly simple purpose, namely, to pursue tests of the interference theory of forgetting in a short-term memory context. The initial impetus was provided by Melton's (1963) comments to the effect that such tests would bear on the generality of interference theory and on the issue of whether or not short-and longterm memory are mediated by a single type of storage mechanism. Having now conducted the experiments, we are less than certain that they have anything convincing to say about such issues. What they do seem to have revealed, though, are (a) some observations which appear to

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