Determinants of short-term forgetting: decay, retroactive interference or proactive interference?

Abstract

[Abstract]: In two experiments short-term forgetting was investigated in a short-term cued recall task designed to examine proactive interference effects. Mixed modality study lists were tested at varying retention intervals using verbal and non-verbal distractor activities. When an interfering foil was read aloud and a target item read silently, strong PI effects were observed for both types of distractor activity. When the target was read aloud and followed by a verbal distractor activity, weak PI effects emerged. However, when a target item was read aloud and non-verbal distractor activity filled the retention interval, performance was immune to the effects of PI for at least eight seconds. The results indicate that phonological representations of items read aloud still influence performance after 15 seconds of distractor activity.