Proactive Inhibition Experiment An experiment was carried out using the

An experiment was carried out using the Brown-Peterson task to test the hypothesis that proactive inhibition (PI) with recall distractors occurs during recall of words of the same semantic category, and that release occurs if the semantic category of the stimulus words is changed. Participants were students at........, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: PI with no release; PI with release; and a control group with no PI. Results showed that proactive inhibition of recall did occur using the same semantic category, but that this inhibition was released by changing the semantic category. The only problem encountered was that the results of the third trial did not align with those of the other four trials, the recall being higher than expected in the experimental groups, and lower than expected in the control group. This was deemed due to experimental error.

Key words: proactive inhibition, release from proactive inhibition, recall performance, semantic category, distractor

The Brown-Peterson paradigm is a well-studied phenomenon in which subjects are shown a small number of words from the same semantic category for a short time, followed by a distracting action, such as an arithmetic activity, and then asked to recall the words (Talasli, ????). It has been found that although the word recall may be good on the first trial, it deteriorates with subsequent trials using words from the same semantic category. This

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The results also suggest that in short-term PI, word recall comes from the associative-semantic component of memory. PI is probably due to a drop in discriminability of items as the test progresses. The short-term memory concept for recall was reconfirmed by Cowan, Wood and Borne (1994). They used serial-recall with a "through-list" distractor, as well as a between-trials recall distractor . In this procedure, the distractor is inserted between words in the list to be memorized as well as between trials. They began with the hypothesis that if the short-term storage concept of word-length effect is correct, it should not be present in the through-list procedure because short-term storage would be lost when the distractor list is introduced. If time is not a factor in list recall, then the through-list distractor should have no effect. Results showed that there was an advantage for short words, indicating there is a transient memory form which is lost over the distractor interval when a through-list distractor is used. This confirms the concept of a separate short-term memory storage system. A series of experiments by Keppel and Underwood (????) also looked at the effect of PI on short-term and long-term memory. They f

Category: Science - P