THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE MNEMONIC BENEFITS OF PERCEPTUAL INTERFERENCE

How should interfering with the perception of items during study affect memory for those items? Recent research by Nairne (1988) and Hirshman and Mulligan (1991) has demonstrated that backward pattern masking during study enhances later memory. This article examines whether traditional explanations of encoding benefits, including rehearsal, visual distinctiveness, and encoding effort, can account for this result. No evidence was found for any of these hypotheses. An explanation that focuses on the compensatory processing of higher level perceptual representations is proposed. This explanation provides a plausible explanation of the results of 7 experiments. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the explanation for perceptual priming and other manipulations of perceptual interference.