Change has been described as detrimental for later memory for the original event in research on retroactive interference. Popular accounts of retroactive interference treat learning as the formation of simple associations and explain interference as due to response competition, perhaps along with unlearning or inhibition of the original response.…

Declarative concepts (i.e., key terms with short definitions of the abstract concepts denoted by those terms) are a common kind of information that students are expected to learn in many domains. A common pedagogical approach for supporting learning of declarative concepts involves presenting students with concrete examples that illustrate how the…

Research on the strategic regulation of memory accuracy has focused primarily on monitoring and control processes used to edit out incorrect information after it is retrieved (back-end control). Recent studies, however, suggest that rememberers also enhance accuracy by preventing the retrieval of incorrect information in the first place (front-end…

Three experiments examined testing effects on learning of natural concepts and metacognitive assessments of such learning. Results revealed that testing enhanced recognition memory and classification accuracy for studied and novel exemplars of bird families on immediate and delayed tests. These effects depended on the balance of study and test…

The item-specific proportion congruency (ISPC) effect is the finding of attenuated interference for mostly incongruent as compared to mostly congruent items. A debate in the Stroop literature concerns the mechanisms underlying this effect. Noting a confound between proportion congruency and contingency, Schmidt and Besner (2008) suggested that…

The authors examined whether participants can shift their criterion for recognition decisions in response to the probability that an item was previously studied. Participants in 3 experiments were given recognition tests in which the probability that an item was studied was correlated with its location during the test. Results from all 3…

Argues for the importance of combining the concerns of the functionalist (Dewey, 1910) approach to memory with investigations of the effects of context and task demands. Two experiments are reported that demonstrate interactions between task demands and the more traditional functionalist variables. Particularly demonstrates that the effects of…

Paper based on experiment 1 which was presented at the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis, Mo., 1972. (RS)