Relational and item-specific information in the determination of "blocking effects"

Items organized ("blocked") by membership in common categories are generally better remembered than unorganized items. In experiments conducted by Gollin and Sharps (1988), however, this blocking effect was largely confined to verbal stimuli. In the present manuscript, we show that this result may reflect differences in the processing of item-specific and relational information, as first described by Einstein and Hunt (1980). This hypothesis requires that the blocking effect for verbal stimuli diminish over longer retention intervals and that this diminution be attenuated or arrested by instructional manipulations at encoding. The present results verified these conjectures and replicated the result of Gollin and Sharps (1988). The findings suggest that the results of Gollin and Sharps were predictable from the application of item-specific/relational information theory and that the theory may appropriately be applied to paradigms involving both verbal and nonverbal stimuli.