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Creating proactive interference in immediate recall: building a dog from a dart, a mop, and a fig
1Department of Psychology, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. tehan@usq.edu.au
Memory & Cognition
|June 4, 1998
Summary
Short-term memory recall is influenced by phonemic codes, even with semantic information. This study shows how phonemic features in short-term memory create proactive interference (PI) in cued recall tasks.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Memory Research
Background:
- Phonemic codes are critical in immediate serial recall models.
- Proactive interference (PI) in short-term memory is also affected by phonemic codes.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how distributed representations and storage of semantic and phonemic codes can create PI.
- To operationalize these assumptions in a short-term cued recall task.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments were conducted to generate phonemic characteristics of a foil from filler items.
- Proactive interference was assessed under conditions of rhyming foils and distributed phonemes.
Main Results:
- Proactive interference was observed when a foil's rhyme was studied.
- PI occurred when the foil's phonemes were distributed across filler items.
- These findings support feature bundle storage in short-term memory.
Conclusions:
- Short-term memory stores items as feature bundles.
- All items in short-term memory are simultaneously available during retrieval.
- Phonemic similarity plays a significant role in short-term memory interference.