Retroactive Inhibition: Associative Loss or Response Suppression?

Experiments I and II had subjects learn under procedures designed to produce retroactive inhibition. Informed subjects were given instructions that permitted full and immediate reinstatement of the first-list responses. In spite of the greater availability of responses, these subjects did not link more responses to appropriate first-list stimuli than did uninformed subjects: associative loss remained evident. The theory of response suppression holds that such associative loss can occur only by the failure of the response-selector mechanism for excluding first-list responses from second-list learning. Experiment III minimized the possibility of such failure, but associative loss was still pronounced.