A Reexamination of Isolation-by-Material in Serial Learning

Abstract

It was argued that tests of isolation-by-material have had item difference confounded with both ease of learning and with response learning requirements. To match total-list item difficulty, each trigram list in the present experiment included one discrepantly difficult item: either a low-AV CVC or a CCC unit (which differed both in difficulty and in structure). This study, based on the reconstruction method (which minimizes response learning requirements), did show isolation effects for the discrepant item, thus verifying that it was recognized as different. It was suggested that prior results reporting isolation-by-meaningfulness effects in serial anticipation tasks may have limited generality and must be qualified with respect to type of material and task requirements.