Samenvatting
An experiment is reported on the effects of cognitive similarity on proactive and retroactive interference (PI,RI) in short term memory. To avoid confounding between cognitive and acoustic similarity, the materials- i.e. words and digits- were matched with respect to vowel pattern. Effects of both PI and RI were found on recall of words, while recall of digits was only affected by RI. It is suggested that a string of digits can be more easily organized than a string unconnected words.