有意味学習の実験的研究 II

逆向抑制について

抄録

The present study aimed at investigating the difference in retroactive inhibition between meaningful and rote learning.
Ss, who were university students, were required to learn a series of 3 lists of paired-associates. S-term of each pair was a word and R-term was a NS or a combination of 2 or 3 NSs with English connectives (see Table 1). According to the kind of list, Ss were classified into 3 groups: M-M gr., Ss of which could learn both the second and third lists meaningfully, M-R gr., who could learn the second meaningfully but not the third, and R-R gr., who could learn neither of them meaningfully (Table 4).
Ss learned Lists 1, 2 and 3 successively. After that, they were required to relearn List 2 and List 3. In each test session, which was given after the learning of one list, Ss were given a test of the list learned immediately before and tests of the other lists learned previously (Table 3). Performance of Ss at the test immediately after the original learning (List 2 or 3) and that of after the interference learning (List 3 or 2, respectively) were compared, in order to clarify the effect of retroactive inhibition.
The results were as follows:
1) When the original learning had been meaningful, the effect of retroactive inhibition was very small (Table 6 & 7). The mean reduction ratio in number of complete correct response was only 5.2%. In case of rote learning, however, the effect was much larger, i.e., mean reduction ratio was 53.6% (Table 9).
2) Meaningfulness in interference learning was irrelevant to the size of the effect of retroactive inhibition (also Table 6-9).
These results suggested that meaningful learning, compared with rote learning, can achieve more stable knowledge which is less vulnerable to interference learning.