The effect of non-factual post-training negative comment on the recall of verbal information

Healthy human volunteers were asked to study a 250-word account of the 1954 World Football Cup and submitted to a questionnaire on the verbally learned material 48 h later. The subjects were divided into 7 groups. One received no treatment between text and questionnaire. The others were shown either a brief laudatory or derogatory comment on the World Cup 0, 3, or 6 h after having read the text. The comment contained no facts relevant to the text. Subjects exposed to the derogatory comment 0 or 3 h after having studied the text performed much worse in the questionnaire than any of the other groups. Performance in another, unrelated, general knowledge memory test was not affected by reading the World Cup text or subsequent comments. Thus post-event non-factual information was able to affect recall of verbally acquired factual material even if presented 3 h later; the effect does not seem to be explicable by a general performance deficit, and may be due to integration of information acquired during and after the event into one single experience.