ABSTRACT

In the presentations at the conference honoring Henry (Roddy) L. Roediger, III, the speakers were encouraged to make some connection between their work and his. Roediger’s work has been in the area of long-term memory, whereas the work in our lab has been on language and short-term memory, and, consequently, connections were not obvious. However, a review of Roediger’s earlier research uncovered an area of common interest—specifically, an interest in the negative consequences of prior retrieval for subsequent retrieval from the same semantic category (e.g., Neely, Schmidt, & Roediger, 1983; Roediger, 1973). Studies of episodic and semantic memory carried out by Roediger and others have documented what has been termed retrieval-induced inhibition, that is, poorer recall of items from the same semantic category after cueing with the category name and some category members (part-list cueing; Roediger, 1973) or simply after retrieving several items from the same category (Brown, 1979, 1981). Similarly, studies of picture naming have documented slower reaction times in naming pictures drawn repeatedly from the same category compared to items drawn from mixed categories (e.g., Belke, Meyer, & Damian, 2005; Brown, 1981; Kroll & Stewart, 1994).