Proactive inhibition and item similarity in short-term memory

The neural bases of the effects of item-nonspecific proactive interference in working memory

“…First, item-specific PI is defined as the situation that arises when the probe from trial n matches a memorandum from trial n − 1. Second, it has been established that itemnonspecific PI is insensitive to the repetition of specific items across trials (Wickens et al, 1963). Nevertheless, we also examined behavioral data from the face study separately, to determine whether item-nonspecific PI effects were also seen in a task in which no item appeared in more than one trial of the entire experiment.…”

“…Thus, Keppel and Underwood (1962) famously demonstrated that there is virtually no forgetting on the first trial of the Brown-Peterson task, regardless of the length of time separating target presentation from response, but that errors are already present on the second trial, even at the shortest of delays. And Wickens and colleagues have established that proactive interference (PI)-the disruption of performance on a memory task attributable to antecedent information -need not be produced by the repeated presentation of one or more particular items but that it is also present if items from preceding trials are drawn from the same class of stimuli (e.g., letters or digits; Wickens, Born, & Allen, 1963) or from the same semantic category (in the case of nouns), or even if they are simply presented with similar perceptual characteristics (e.g., letter case, modality, figure/ground, or slide area; Wickens, 1973). The present study Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to B. R. Postle, 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706 (e-mail: postle@wisc.edu)..…”

“…An implication of this is that the PI resolution mechanism(s) studied by Jonides and colleagues is only engaged phasically, after the onset of the probe stimulus reveals its formal similarity with a memorandum from a previous trial (D 'Esposito et al, 1999). Item-nonspecific PI, in contrast, develops as the number of items presented during a testing session accumulates, with or without formal similarity among items from different trials (Keppel & Underwood, 1962;Wickens, 1973;Wickens et al, 1963). Although the precise factors underlying this phenomenon remain unclear, overlap of the representations of memoranda from different trials and/or weakening of the contextual tags linking specific representations with particular trials are candidate explanations.…”

Connotative classification and proactive interference in short-term memory

“…A study by Wickens, Born, & Allen (1963) indicated that PI in STM is relatively class specific. Wickens et al observed that shifting to digits, for example, after a series of STM tests with consonants, produced an apparent "release from PI" in that the digit target item was recalled at approximately the same level as the first item of the series.…”

Release from Proactive Interference With Positive and Negative Words

“…The release from proactive interference (RPI) task continues to be a useful memory encoding tool (Wickens, 1972;Wickens, Born , & Allen , 1963;Perez & Kee, 2000) . This task examines short-term memory performance and interference and follows the methodology of the BrownPeterson short-term memory procedure.…”