Erroneous and veridical recall are not two sides of the same coin: Evidence from semantic distraction in free recall.
Two experiments examined the extent to which erroneous recall blocks veridical recall using, as a vehicle for study, the disruptive impact of distractors that are semantically similar to a list of words presented for free recall. Instructing participants to avoid erroneous recall of to-be-ignored spoken distractors attenuated their recall but this did not influence the disruptive effect of those distractors on veridical recall (Experiment 1). Using an externalized output-editing procedure-whereby participants recalled all items that came to mind and identified those that were erroneous-the usual between-sequences semantic similarity effect on erroneous and veridical recall was replicated but the relationship between the rate of erroneous and veridical recall was weak (Experiment 2). The results suggest that forgetting is not due to veridical recall being blocked by similar events.
School of Psychology.
John E
JE
Marsh
Department of Psychology, University of London.
Robert W
RW
Hughes
Department of Building, Energy, and Environmental Engineering.
Patrik
P
Sörqvist
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences.
C Philip
CP
Beaman
School of Psychology.
Dylan M
DM
Jones
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D013334:Students; D014495:Universities