Lack of proactive inhibition in a psychomotor task at two retention intervals

One form of the Tsai-Partington numbers test was given for 0, 1, 8, or 19 original learning trials, and a different form was given for 10 transfer learning trials. Retention of transfer learning was tested after 24 hr for half of the subjects and after 2 min and again after 24 hr for the remainder of the subjects. Amount of forgetting of transfer learning increased with the length of the retention interval, but was not affected by the number of original learning trials; i.e., no proactive inhibition was observed. Also, performance during the transfer phase of the experiment was not significantly related to the number of original learning trials; no transfer was demonstrated. A previous study had found substantial retroactive inhibition with this task.