Interference with real world knowledge

Two experiments are described in which subjects studied made-up, fantasy facts about well-known persons and then were asked to verify actual facts about these persons. Reaction time to the actual facts was longer the more fantasy propositions studied about a person. Reaction time was also longer when the verification test involved a mixture of actual and fantasy facts rather than just actual facts. A mathematical version of the ACT model (Anderson, 1976) was fit to the data. It provides a satisfactory fit, better than an alternate model. However, some of the parameter values estimated for the ACT model seemed unreasonable.