The question considered in this study is whether retroactive interference is influenced by a subject's prior knowledge of the material being studied. Two parallel passages of fictitious biographical information and an accompanying twenty-item short answer criterion test were developed. The fifteen subjects in the experimental group were told that…

Two hundred sixty-five subjects learned a mixed list of paired associates in an AB, AD and AB, CD transfer paradigm. Two levels of semantic processing were factorially varied across original and interpolated pairs. Recall of original pairs was shown to be directly related to the processing depth of original pairs in both paradigms and inversely…