Citation

Hirshman E, Burns DJ, Kuo TM. Mem. Cognit. 1993; 21(1): 5-10.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 27599-3270.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1993, Psychonomic Society)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

8433648

Abstract

Burns (1989) claims that proactive interference effects occur in paired-associate learning because of tradeoffs in relational and response-specific processing. Consistent with this claim, Burns demonstrated that free recall of critical-list responses is better in the interference condition than in the control condition. Burns's processing tradeoff explanation predicts that the occurrence of this reverse-interference effect should be positively correlated with the occurrence of traditional interference effects. We present several experiments whose results are inconsistent with this prediction. We hypothesize that the reverse-interference effect is a list-length effect. The results of a final experiment, contrasting the predictions of the list-length and processing tradeoff explanations, support the list-length explanation.

Language: en