Proactive inhibition in short-term memory: Availability or accessibility?

Abstract

Three experiments are reported investigating whether the decreasing recall over trials in the Brown-Peterson paradigm-proactive inhibition (PI)-• derives from encoding or storage (availability) differences between items or from retrieval (accessibility) differences. In the first experiment, the first, second, third, or fourth item was repeated after three, five, or seven intervening trials for different groups of subjects. Recall of the repeated item decreased as a function of trial of initial presentation and spacing of repetitions. The second experiment demonstrated that the differences in repeateditem recall were not attributable to the different probabilities of recalling the first presentation. The third experiment indicated that prior-item recall does not affect the availability of succeeding items. In none of the experiments was there any evidence of PI in final free recall. It was argued that final free recall is inappropriate for the interpretation of PI effects. An encoding hypothesis of PI development is discussed.

Proactive interference in short-term and delayed recall.

“…The better identification of Trial 2 and 3 words in the initial-recall as compared with the no-initial-recall condition indicates that recall of these items enhances their recall and/or their discriminability. This result parallels a related finding in Radtke and Grove (1977) where an error analysis of Brown-Peterson recall revealed that intrusion errors were much more likely when the preceding trial was a no-recall trial than when it was a recall trial, and intrusion errors were more likely to come from some preceding no-recall trial. The better identification of Trial 2 and 3 words for the initialrecall group in the present study is consistent with the interpretation in the Radtke and Grove study that the act of recall enhances differentiation of the words, that is, makes them more discriminable and identifiable.…”

“…Trial 2 and 3 words may not have had the advantage of such distinctive "firstness" cues and were therefore not as easily identified. In a study in which items were repeated in a series of Brown-Peterson trials, Radtke and Grove (1977) found that repeated Trial 1 words were better recalled than repeated later trial words and proposed that the distinctive firstness cues enhanced recall of the repeated Trial 1 words because subjects could continue to differentiate the first words from later presented words. This hypothesis is consistent with the present data, although it is possible that the Trial 1 words were simply stored better on grounds other than firstness information.…”

“…In this view items presented on earlier trials exert a detrimental effect on recall because of difficulties in discriminating current from earlier presented items (Bennett, 1975;Gardiner, Craik, & Birtwistle, 1972;Loftus & Patterson, 1975) or because of increased difficulty in generating or calling the current items to mind (Dillon & Bittner, 1975;Dillon & Thomas, 1975;Watkins & Watkins, 1975). However, as we stressed in an earlier article (Radtke & Grove, 1977) and as pointed out by Craik (1979), attributing PI solely to encoding, storage, or retrieval processes is an oversimplification because discriminable encodings must be formed, maintained, and retrieved in order for recall to be successful. In the Brown-Peterson (1959) paradigm, successful recall not only requires information that an item has been presented, but also information that would differentiate…”

“…The identification test for trial of presentation provides an answer to questions about the persistence of specific occurrence information and whether the accuracy of such specific occurrence information varies as a function of trials. Radtke and Grove (1977) advanced the hypothesis that first-trial words in a series of related words have distinctive, salient specific occurrence information associated with them, namely, that they were presented first. Later presented words do not have such salient or distinctive specific occurrence cues.…”

Proactive interference effects with television news items: Further evidence.

“…An important and as yet unresolved theoretical issue in PI experimentation is just where the effects are located. Three types of interpretation have been advanced, placing the locus of PI in the encoding stage (Carey, 1973;Dillon, 1973;Radtke & Grove, 1977), the storage stage (Chechile & Butler, 1975;Gorfein, 1974), and the retrieval stage of memory (Loftus & Patterson, 1975;Watkins & Watkins, 1975).…”