Harold O. Bettencourt’s scientific contributions

Conducted 3 experiments with a total of 169 undergraduates, using the Brown-Peterson distractor task. In Exps I and II, recall was better (a) when 2 presentations of an item (a word-triple) were separated by a 22-sec interval of distracting activity rather than by a 7-sec interval (the spaced-practice effect); and (b) when a single presentation of an item was preceded by a 27-sec interval of distracting activity rather than by a 12-sec interval (decay of proactive interference). However, Exp III revealed that the spacing of 2 presentations produced no effect when decay of proactive interference was controlled. Further analysis revealed that neither effects (a) nor (b) were likely to be related to decay of traces from short-term store (as inferred from forgetting curves). Results also show that while rehearsal of an item had large effects on recall probability of that item, it had no effect on the proactive interference upon subsequent items. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)