Familiarity influences on proactive interference in verbal memory.

ABSTRACT: Proactive interference occurs when older memories interfere with current information processing and retrieval. It is often explained with reference to familiarity, where the reappearance of highly familiar items from the recent past produces more disruption than older, less familiar items. However, there are other forms of familiarity beyond recency that may be important, and these were explored in a verbal recent-probes task. Participants viewed eight targets per trial and then determined whether a probe matched any of those targets. Probes matching a target from the previous trial, rather than an earlier trial, led to more errors, revealing proactive interference. However, this effect was influenced by experimental familiarity (whether stimuli were repeated or unique) and pre-experimenta

SUBMITTER: Mercer T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12335633 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature