Examining a processing tradeoff explanation of proactive interference

Burns (1989) claims that proactive interference effects occur in paired-associate learning because of tradeoffs in relational and response-specific processing. Consistent with this claim, Burns demonstrated that free recall of critical-list responses is better in the interference condition than in the control condition. Burns’s processing trade off explanation predicts that the occurrence of this reverse-interference effect should be positively correlated with the occurrence of traditional interference effects. We present several experiments whose results are inconsistent with-this-prediction. We hypothesize that the reverse-interference effect is a list-length effect. The results of a final experiment, contrasting the predictions of the list-length and processing trade off explanations, support the list-length explanation.