This study compared the effects of (+/-)3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, d-amphetamine, and cocaine on performance of rats in a delayed matching-to-sample procedure using a variety of indices of performance to determine the mechanism by which working memory task impairments arise. All 3 drugs produced an overall delay-independent decrease in accuracy rather than a delay-dependent increase in ...

We examined the hypothesis that interpolated testing in a multiple list paradigm protects against proactive interference by sustaining test expectancy during encoding. In both experiments, recall on the last of 5 word lists was compared between 4 conditions: a tested group who had taken tests on all previous lists, an untested group who had not taken any tests on previous lists, and 2 other gro...

M. G. Berman, J. Jonides, and R. L. Lewis (2009) adapted the recent-probes task to investigate the causes of forgetting in short-term memory. In 7 experiments, they studied the persistence of memory traces by assessing the level of proactive interference generated by previous-trial items over a range of intertrial intervals. None of the experiments found a reduction in proactive interference ov...

In the current study the influence of proactive interference (PI) and practice on recall from a visuospatial working memory (WM) task was examined. Participants completed a visuospatial WM span task under either high-PI conditions (a traditional span task) or low-PI conditions (a span task with breaks between trials). Trials of each length (i.e., two to five to-be-remembered items) were equally...

To determine what factors are important for minimizing interference effects in spatial memory, Clark's Nutcrackers, Nucifraga columbiana were tested for their spatial memory for two serial lists of locations per day. In this experiment two unique landmark sets were either different between List 1 and List 2 or the same. We found that Nutcrackers were most susceptible to interference when the la...

Learning face-name pairings at a social function becomes increasingly more difficult the more individuals one meets. This phenomenon is attributable to proactive interference--the negative influence of prior learning on subsequent learning. Recent evidence suggests that taking a memory test can alleviate proactive interference in verbal list learning paradigms. We apply this technique to face-n...

Previous memoranda can interfere with the memorization or storage of new information, a concept known as proactive interference. Studies of proactive interference typically use categorical memoranda and match-to-sample tasks with categorical measures such as the proportion of correct to incorrect responses. In this study we instead train five macaques in a spatial memory task with continuous me...

Sequences of events can affect selective attention either through proactive mechanisms, through reactive mechanisms, or through a combination of the two. The current study examined electrophysiological responses to both prime and target stimuli in a primed dichotic listening task. Each trial presented a distractor prime syllable followed by two simultaneous syllables, and participants were aske...

Two experiments investigated the possibility that the word-length effect in short-term memory (STM) is a consequence of long words generating a greater level of retroactive interference than shorter words. In Experiment 1, six-word lists were auditorily presented under articulatory suppression for immediate serial reconstruction of only the first three words. These three words were always drawn...