Short Term Forgetting in the Absence of Proactive Interference

It has been claimed that the short-term forgetting shown by the Peterson technique is entirely due to proactive interference from prior experimental items. Two experiments investigated this by studying forgetting when prior items were avoided by testing subjects only once. Both experiments showed significant forgetting, although the degree of forgetting was less than with a multitrial procedure. On the basis of this and other results it is suggested that the Peterson technique comprises two components, a primary memory component which decays within 6 sec, and a more stable secondary memory component. Forgetting with the multitrial procedure is attributed principally to the need to use temporal retrieval cues to avoid confusion between successive items; longer retention intervals are associated with reduced temporal discriminability and hence poorer recall.