The role of inhibitory processes in part-list cuing

Providing a subset of studied items as retrieval cues can have detrimental effects on recall of the remaining items. In 2 experiments, the authors examined such part-list cuing impairment in a repeated-testing situation. Participants studied exemplars from several semantic categories and were given 2 successive cued-recall tests separated by a distractor task of several minutes. Part-list cues were provided in the 1st test but not the 2nd. Noncue item recall was tested with the studied category cues (same probes) in the 1st test, but novel, unstudied retrieval cues (independent probes) in the 2nd test. The authors found detrimental effects of part-list cues in both the 1st (same-probe) test and the 2nd (independent-probe) test. These results show that part-list cuing impairment can be lasting and is not eliminated with independent probes. The findings support the view that the impairment was caused by retrieval inhibition.