Proactive interference and gender change in short- term memory

Abstract

An examination was made of the salience of word gender as an encoding dimension. Ss received three Brown-Peterson tests with Spanish nouns, all of the same gender. On Test 4, there was a change in word gender for experimental Ss, and no change for control Ss. A small, but significant, release from PI occurred with gender change. Results were interpreted in terms of Wickens’s (1972) classification of stimulus dimensions.