Actually, I student I mentored for her honors thesis investigated
the effectiveness of various distractor tasks in memory paradigms.
She found that most math based tasks, indeed, do not distract very
much--that the verbal memory task and the mathematical distractor
seem to be performed _somewhat_ independently. We hope to get these
data published soon, but in the meantime we found that the most
distracting distractor task is a verbal task created very, very
carefully to not produce interference effects. You may want to
rerun your task with something like a generating opposites task
in which you provide your participants with an ongoing list of
words (hot, up, inside, white, etc.) and their task is to provide
the first opposite that comes to mind. Make the words come fairly
quickly if you can so there is no time in between thinking of words
to provide an opportunity for rehearsal.
This should work fo the B-P task since it is a fairly simple task
involving CCCs.
annette
On Sun, 5 Mar 2000, Michael Ofsowitz wrote:
> For a class project I had students look for release from proactive
> interference in STM. They used the Brown-Peterson-Peterson
> distraction technique of counting backwards by 3's starting with
> 3-digit numbers like 482 to prevent rehearsal. One student reported
> the following:
>
> >Some subjects reported that when the numbers that started off as
> >easy calculations ie multiples of 3 or the number 0 they had less
> >trouble remembering the words than when the starting number was not
> >an easy calculation ie the numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, etc.
>
> Another student said that at debriefing one of her subjects said he
> was trying extra hard to remember the words while counting backwards.
>
> Is this common? Does B-P not distract rehearsal sufficiently in some
> instances (e.g., where the initial subtractions are more easily
> calculated)?
>
> --> Mike O.
> --
> _______________________________________________
>
> Michael S. Ofsowitz
> University of Maryland - European Division
> http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~mofsowit
> _______________________________________________
>
>
Annette Taylor, Ph. D.
Department of Psychology E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of San Diego Voice: (619) 260-4006
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego, CA 92110
"Education is one of the few things a person
is willing to pay for and not get."
-- W. L. Bryan
