Effects of Interference in STM with Minimum Covert Rehearsal

Abstract

Each of 54 CCCs was followed by an interpolated task consisting of a series of random digits and letters. Ss' task was to recall the trigram and the number of occurrences of the first digit in the interpolated task series. When interpolated task performance was perfect, recall was not affected by the interpolated task letters although, when interpolated task performance was inaccurate, recall decreased with an increasing proportion of interpolated task letters. The results suggest that covert rehearsal may be minimized by considering only those trials on which interpolated-task performance is accurate and that interference effects are possibly mediated by covert rehearsal.