ABSTRACT
The distinction between item and associative information (Humphreys, 1976; Murdock, 1974) has growing empirical support Previous research has demonstrated differences in encoding operations (e.g., McGee, 1980) and retrieval processes (Dosher, 1988; Gronlund & Ratcliff, 1989). The present research examined differences in forgetting rates. Four experiments measured both item and associative recognition performance as a function of study-test lag. All experiments showed that the rate of forgetting, or susceptibility to interference effects, is greater for item information than for associative information. The implications of this finding are considered with respect to current models of recognition memory.
