Proactive Inhibition in Retarded Persons: Some Clues to Short-Term Memory Processing

Abstract

Publisher Summary One of the most investigated aspects of learning in mentally retarded persons has been the question of how information is processed in short-term memory (STM), that aspect of memory in which information is stored for about 30 seconds. One experimental method that adequately examines the loss, the cues needed to access the information, and the structure of the organization in STM is the Brown-Peterson paradigm. The technique consists of presenting short lists of items (e.g., three words) for later recall, a distractor task between lists to prevent rehearsal of those items, and recall after each list. Over lists, or trials, the efficiency of the recall of each list diminishes, and this decrease in recall is referred to as a buildup of proactive inhibition (PI). In every study in which mentally retarded persons is tested using the Brown-Peterson paradigm, the buildup of PI did not vary as a function of the different types of classes of stimuli used. Seemingly, what is being encoded during PI buildup are item characteristics with little regard for the category or class the items belong to. The observation concludes that mentally retarded persons fail to use categorical information that is available to them; otherwise, the amount of recall would be greater for some categories than others because some categories are more available to the group than are others.