Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 16, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Spontaneous recovery in human instrumental learning: Integration of information and recency to primacy shift
Luis Jesús López-Romero1, Rodolfo García-Barraza, Javier Vila
1F.E.S. Iztacala, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Tlalnepantla, Edo Méx., Mexico.
Abstract:
This experiment was conducted to study the effect of changes in the retention interval (RI) on spontaneous recovery within an acquisition-test interference task. College students learned a reversal conditional discrimination to solve a task involving conflicting phases across two training phases. When the test was conducted immediately after training, participants' performance revealed recency, behaving according to the information received during the last phase. Performance after retention interval averaged the information received across phases, regardless of the length of the RI (1.5, 3, 24 or 48 h). These results are not in agreement with traditional theories of spontaneous recovery as they predict a recency to primacy shift effect of the RI. An interpretation of spontaneous recovery based on a temporal weighting rule (TWR) is discussed.
Related Concept Videos
Interference and Decay
Interference occurs when competing memories hinder the retrieval of particular information. It can be classified into two types: proactive and retroactive interference. Proactive...
Principles of Classical Conditioning
During the...
Real-World Application of Classical Conditioning
Higher-order, or second-order, conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus becomes associated with an already established conditioned stimulus through repeated pairings. For instance, if a dog has been...
Long-term Potentiation
Long-term Potentiation
Hebbian LTP
LTP can occur when presynaptic neurons...
Implicit Memories
One key aspect of implicit...

