The directed forgetting effect obtained with the item method is supposed to depend on both selective rehearsal of to-be-remembered (TBR) items and attentional inhibition of to-be-forgotten (TBF) items. In this study, we investigated the locus of the directed forgetting deficit in older adults by exploring the influence of recollection and familiarity-based retrieval processes on age-related dif...

Proactive interference was assessed with a variant of the process-dissociation procedure, which separates effects of habit (accessibility bias) and recollection (discriminability). In three cued-recall experiments, proactive interference was shown to be an effect of bias rather than an effect on actual remembering. Divided attention, age, and study duration selectively influenced the recollecti...

A model of cognitive control in task switching is developed in which controlled performance depends on the system maintaining access to a code in episodic memory representing the most recently cued task. The main constraint on access to the current task code is proactive interference from old task codes. This interference and the mechanisms that contend with it reproduce a wide range of behavio...

BACKGROUND Visual working memory capacity is extremely limited and appears to be relatively immune to practice effects or the use of explicit strategies. The recent discovery that visual working memory tasks, like verbal working memory tasks, are subject to proactive interference, coupled with the fact that typical visual working memory tasks are particularly conducive to proactive interference...

People unconsciously and unintentionally make inferences about others' personality traits based on their behaviours. In this study, a classic memory phenomenon--proactive interference (PI)--is for the first time used to detect spontaneous trait inferences. PI should occur when lists of behaviour descriptions, all implying the same trait, are to be remembered. Switching to a new trait should pro...

Empirical data indicate that when memory for subspan lists of taxonomically related material is tested immediately after study, prior experience with lists involving the same material has no effect upon recall or recognition. In six experiments, we explored the possibility that immunity to proactive interference (PI) is related to discriminative information that is provided by transient phonemi...

The task-switching paradigm offers enormous possibilities to study cognitive control as well as task interference. The current review provides an overview of recent research on both topics. First, we review different experimental approaches to task switching, such as comparing mixed-task blocks with single-task blocks, predictable task-switching and task-cuing paradigms, intermittent instructio...

Three experiments contrasted recollection of change with differentiation as means of avoiding retroactive interference and proactive interference. We manipulated the extent to which participants looked back to notice change between pairs of cues and targets (A-B, A-D) and measured the effects on later cued recall of either the first or second response. Two lists of word pairs were presented. So...