An Interference Measure of Category-Access Time in Long-Term Memory

Abstract

An interference method was used to measure category-entry time, stage one in the process of retrieval of words from long-term memory, where the second stage involves retrieval of a word from a given category. Time delay was varied between presentation of the name of a category and an initial letter cueing word-recall. The range of delay was varied between 0 and .45 sec. A steep increase in retrieval response time occurred when interstimulus delay was reduced to .27 sec., suggesting that mean category-access time lies close to this value. A subtractive measure yielded a similar estimate. These interference measures and the interference-subtractive estimates of category-access time approximated those found by Freedman and Loftus (1971) using a different subtractive measure, thus providing support for their findings and for a two-stage retrieval model.

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