Incidental development of associations in simultaneous learning

Abstract

Subjects learned two lists of words simultaneously by free recall procedures. The purpose was to determine if the words from the two different lists occurring together on the study trials became associated as a result of their contiguous occurrence. Tests of incidental learning were made by having the subjects learn a bidirectional paired associate list in which the pairs consisted of appropriate pairings (words that occurred together on the study trials of free recall) or inappropriate pairings (words that had not occurred together during free recall learning). Appropriate pairings resulted in heavy positive transfer, whereas inappropriate pairings produced severe negative transfer. The evidence seemed to indicate that associations were formed incidentally between words appearing together during the study trials of free recall.