Abstract
Young children’s encoding was studied with the release from proactive interference (PI) paradigm. Second-graders’ recall decreased over three trials on which stimulus triads were drawn from a given conceptual category. Recall improvement was observed when, on a fourth trial, the stimulus materials were instances of a different conceptual category. However, this release from PI occurred only when the stimulus items were category-typical exemplars of the categories, and not when atypical instances were employed. The results suggest that not only is the dimension of the stimulus materials important in affecting release from PI, but so also is the typicality of the items selected to illustrate that dimension.
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This research was supported in part by Grant HD 08459 from the United States Public Health Service. We are grateful to school officials in Montgomery County, North Carolina, for their assistance in obtaining subjects for this study. Thanks are also due Kathleen Corsale for making available to us the stimulus materials used in the Douglas and Corsale (1977) experiment and Howard S. Hock for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Bjorklund, D.F., Smith, S.C. & Ornstein, P.A. Young children’s release from proactive interference: The effects of category typicality. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 20, 211–213 (1982). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334818
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334818