Inhibition from part-list cues and rate of recall.

Subjects recalled words from studied lists for 10 min. in a free-recall situation or in the presence of other list or extralist words. The presence of both types of context words reduced recall relative to free recall, but list-word context had a greater inhibiting effect than extralist word context, and only the list-word context produced a lower rate of approaching the asymptote of the cumulative recall function. The inhibition of recall attributable to the context words was diminished but not eliminated when the restriction to recall only target items was removed. The results of two experiments were generally in substantial agreement with the idea that part-list cues or context words exert their damaging effect by competing with target words at retrieval.