Subjects learned paired associate lists in which word triads were paired with nouns to a partial criterion; they were then given both an immediate and a I-week delayed recognition test for discrimination among the triads and a cued recall test. Recall after 1 week was slightly poorer than that occurring immediately, but it was unaffected by various patterns of element identity among the triads. Discrimination improved somewhat over the I-week interval. Further experiments showed that the immediate test was responsible for both reducing forgetting and improving discrimination, but both effects were independent of identity structure. Forgetting cannot be attributed to loss of differentiation of cues.The primary purpose of this research was to examine the role of discrimination among cues in producing forgetting. The design necessary to accomplish this is straightforward. Subjects learn paired associate lists varying in similarity among cues and then return to the laboratory 1 week later to be retested. The testing procedure consists of a test of associative recall and an independent assessment of discrimination among the items composing the stimulus set.Several experiments from the University of Alberta laboratory have shown a relationship between the number and position of identical elements in the cue terms of paired associates and the difficulty of learning the associates (Runquist, 1972). The most common interpretation of these effects has been in terms of learning discriminations among cues (Anderson & Bower, 1973;Gibson, 1940). It is not clear, however, whether element identity (similarity) affects forgetting. The bulk of the evidence has denied any effect (Underwood, 1961). However, Joinson and Runquist (1968) found that similarity retarded forgetting, and Battig (1966) has persistently maintained that interference during acquisition should facilitate long-term retention.Irrespective of the effect of similarity on forgetting, it is important to determine whether discrimination among cues, once established, is retained over long time intervals or whether it shows the forgetting characteristic of associative information. We might add that forgetting is not a foregone conclusion. Ellis and Daniel (1971) have shown that the ability to distinguish new nonsense shapes from well-studied prototypes does not deteriorate over a 28-day interval. It is possible that intralist discriminations show the same stability. EXPERIMENT 1 MethodThe experiment consisted of five parts and was identical for all subjects. There were four different conditions, but these were This work was supported by Grant A088 from the National Research Council of Canada. James Tousignant, Caroline Renney , and Carrie MacWilliams aided in the collection of the data. defined only by the structure of the list learned. The first part of the experiment was a practice task, the purpose of which was to familiarize the subject with the testing procedure. Subjects were given study-test sequences on six pairs composed of a geometrical form and a two-digit n...

Two experiments were conducted to correlate performance on a test of cue differentiation with cued recall. In one experiment, subjects were given 2, 6, 8, or 12 study repetitions on verbal items consisting of three-word cues and single-word targets. The cues had varying numbers and patterns of identical elements. Cues were tested for differentiability and for their ability to produce target recall. In the second experiment, study repetitions on the same type of lists were followed by the two tests after the second, fourth, and final study repetitions. With a few exceptions, the frequency of occurrence of items that both were successfully differentiated and produced correct recall did not deviate significantly from predictions based on the assumption of independence of the two measures.