Nature of Previous Experimental List Learning and Phenomenon of Simultaneous Acqusition-Retention

Abstract

Underwood and Lund (1979) found that long-term recall of a common list of words increased directly as the number of lists learned simultaneously increased up to three. They called this the simultaneous acquisition-retention phenomenon. The purpose of the present experiment was to see if the nature of proactive interference affects this phenomenon. It was hypothesized that simultaneous learning would proactively interfere with subsequent simultaneous learning and not with single-task learning. 39 subjects were seen on three consecutive days. On the first day subjects learned four lists either simultaneously or singly. On the second day subjects learned either one list or three lists simultaneously. The third day consisted of recalling the list common to all conditions that was learned on the second day. Analysis showed the phenomenon is independent of the nature of proactive interference. Perhaps simultaneous acquisition-retention may result from variability of encoding.