Forgetting in primed fragment completion.

Seven experiments examined the time course of primed fragment-completion performance. A pilot experiment and Experiment 1 showed that rapid forgetting occurs immediately after study for a period of approximately 5 min. The rate of this immediate forgetting is independent of the length of the list. Experiment 2 showed that priming effects were still present after 16 months. Experiments 3 and 4 provided further evidence of forgetting over 1 week. Experiment 5 showed that retention performance after 20 min is unaffected by the interpolated study and recall of other lists of words. Experiment 6 showed that 10-min retention performance was substantially reduced as list length was increased from 10 to 100 words; but it showed no evidence of intralist proactive interference. The combined results of the seven experiments illustrate some similarities and differences between forgetting in primed fragment completion and in episodic memory tasks such as recall and recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)