"Conceptual" similarity and cumulative proactive inhibition
Abstract
Examined whether manipulation of conceptual similarity across paired-associate lists would influence the amount of cumulative proactive inhibition. Each of the low-similarity (LS) lists had stimulus terms that were all members of 1 category (e.g., animal names). The response terms were members of the same category, although different from the category of the stimulus terms. No category was represented in more than 1 list. The high-similarity (HS) lists had instances of several categories occurring once in each of the 8 lists. 48 Ss learned 8 lists, and each list was recalled after 24 hrs. The lists were made up of 10 pairs, with learning carried to a criterion of 8 correct by the anticipation method. The learning of the HS lists took place more rapidly than did the learning of the LS. Recall of the LS lists gave no evidence of cumulative proactive inhibition, whereas the recall of the HS showed a marked increase in forgetting across lists. Results support the idea that cumulative proactive inhibition results from interference mediated by similarity among the items across the lists. (4 ref)