Short-term forgetting of order under conditions of reduced interference

Three experiments examined the short-term retention of order in a modified Brown-Peterson rash. Our intent was to examine the loss of order memory; un confounded by item memory, under conditions in which interference from prio r trials is kept low. In previous work on the short-term forgetting of orde r, experimenters have tended to repeat the same items across trials or to d raw from a restricted set; in our experiments, we changed the to be-recalle d items from trial to trial and used reconstruction as the retention measur e. In all three experiments, very little forgetting was obtained across ret ention intervals that have traditionally produced dramatic and systematic l oss. Our results are reminiscent of those obtained in the Brow Brown-Peters on task when performance is assessed after only the first experimental tria l.