Retroactive inhibition in free-recall learning with alphabetical cues.

Organizational Strategy and Retroactive Inhibition in Free Recall

“…Fourth, the first author has personally acquired many lists in programming PLATO for verbal-learning experiments; the hypothesis is also clearly at variance with his subjective experiences. Finally, the hypothesis fails to explain why alphabetization is an effective strategy only when first letters are not repeated within a list (Earhard, 1967;Zavortink and Keppel, 1968). The differences in organization at recall produced by the recall procedure reflect this phenomenon.…”

“…Zavortink and Keppel (1968) suggested that organizational strategy serves to provide retrieval cues. If it is assumed that subjects asked to alphabetize used first letters and subjects asked to cluster used category names as covert retrieval cues, the results are understandable in terms of the common paired-associate paradigms of retroactive inhibition.…”

“…Zavortink and Keppel (1968) argued that retroactive inhibition in free recall could be analyzed in terms of the traditional paired-associate formulations if the effect of organizational strategy was conceptualized as providing covert retrieval cues for the items. Using the same organizational strategy for the original and interpolated lists would provide the same retrieval cues for the items on both lists, thus forcing the subjects to learn different responses to the same cues, a situation analogous to the A-B, A-C paradigm.…”

Further investigation of retroactive inhibition in categorized free recall.

“…Two previous experiments (Shuell, 1968;Zavortink & Keppel, 1968) have attempted to account for retroactive inhibition (RI) in free recall learning with categorized word lists in terms of conventional paradigms from interference theory. Specifically, it was suggested that when the same categories (S) appear in successive lists, an A-B, A-C paradigm exists for instances of a category, and when different categories (D) are used in two lists, an A-B, A-C paradigm exists for the category names themselves.…”

“…According to the paradigmatic analysis, cued recall should reduce RI for the D group, and not affect the S group. In the Zavortink and Keppel (1968) study, uncued and cued recall were compared in successive tests on the same 5"s, but it is not clear that this procedure is entirely adequate. Therefore, this experiment used separate cued and uncued groups.…”