An extension of a 1976 experiment by O'Neill, Sutcliff, and Tulving was conducted using prose materials to generalize the Wickens release from proactive interference procedure to complex meaningful materials. Release from proactive interference occurred immediately following a taxonomic shift on a critical trial, but this shift effect occurred only in the presence of appropriate retrieval cues. Release from proactive interference may be a phenomenon of both storage and retrieval, and this technique may be generalizable to prose materials as a measure of dimensions along which such materials are encoded.
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