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Review
. 2016 Oct;23(5):1374-1381.
doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0991-4.

On testing the strength independence assumption in retrieval-induced forgetting

Jeroen G W Raaijmakers  1
Affiliations
Review

On testing the strength independence assumption in retrieval-induced forgetting

Jeroen G W Raaijmakers. Psychon Bull Rev. 2016 Oct.

Abstract

Strength independence refers to the assumption that in a retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm, the increase in performance for the practiced items (RP+) is independent of the decrease for the related and supposedly inhibited items (RP-). One way in which this assumption has been tested is by examining the correlation over subjects between these two measures. The finding that there is no such correlation has been taken as evidence for the inhibition account and against noninhibitory accounts of retrieval induced forgetting. We report several, large-scale simulation studies using a simplified version of the SAM model (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, Psychological Review, 88, 93-134, 1981). The results clearly show that such a noninhibitory model is not likely to predict a significant correlation, despite the fact that on the level of the predicted probabilities such a correlation is clearly present. Additional simulations show that this is a very general result and not specifically related to the SAM model that was used. We conclude that such correlations do not provide a good test for the strength independence assumption and will not be able to distinguish between inhibitory and noninhibitory explanations of retrieval-induced forgetting.

Keywords: Human memory; Inhibition and memory; Statistics.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Frequency distribution for the correlation between the strengthening of the practiced items and the RIF effect for the model with variable increments (Simulation 1)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Frequency distribution for the correlation between the strengthening of the practiced items and the RIF effect for the model with constant increments (Simulation 2)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Frequency distribution for the correlation between the strengthening of the practiced items and the RIF effect for the analysis where probabilities are substituted for the actual recall scores (Simulation 3)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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