THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE MNEMONIC BENEFITS OF PERCEPTUAL INTERFERENCE

How should interfering with the perception of items during study affec t memory for those items? Recent research by Nairne (1988) and Hirshma n and Mulligan (1991) has demonstrated that backward pattern masking d uring study enhances later memory. This article examines whether tradi tional explanations of encoding benefits, including rehearsal, visual distinctiveness, and encoding effort, can account for this result. No evidence was found for any of these hypotheses. An explanation that fo cuses on the compensatory processing of higher level perceptual repres entations is proposed. This explanation provides a plausible explanati on of the results of 7 experiments. The article concludes with a discu ssion of the implications of the explanation for perceptual priming an d other manipulations of perceptual interference.