Abstract
The effect of generalized drive (measured by the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale), meaningful-ness, and similarity was examined in a paired associate learning task. Learning was analyzed in two stages, a response-learning (RL) and an associative-matching (AM) stage. The task varied in intralist response similarity and interlist response meaningfulness. Contrary to expectation, the interaction between anxiety and response similarity was not significant. Under conditions of high meaningfulness, low similarity had a facilitatory effect on RL and AM. The results were not predicted by the Taylor-Spence drive theory.
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Petzel, S.V., Solso, R.L. Reponse attributes and anxiety (drive) in paired associate learning. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 11, 255–258 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336824
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03336824