Selective Facilitation and Interference in Retention of Prose

A prose passage may be described at the level of asserted relations among general semantic categories or at the level of predications about specific details (e.g., names, dates, places). This experiment used interpolated learning to facilitate retention of the conceptual macrostructure of an originally learned passage while simultaneously interfering with retention of the originally learned passage's detailed microstructure. The subjects originally learned a short biography; the experimental subjects then learned two more biographies of similar conceptual format which had one third of the details changed. Later, cued recall of changed details of the originally learned passage showed retroactive interference and many intrusion errors. Free recall of the originally learned passage showed depressed recall of changed details and enhanced recall of unchanged details, but equal facilitation in recall of the conceptual macrostructure.