Inhibition, encoding specificity, and response availability revisited

In the think/no-think paradigm people practice “suppressing” a learned response to a cue. Practice at suppression appears to produce a long-lasting inhibition of the suppressed response, as evidenced by a subsequent failure to recall the response to an extralist (associatively related, non-studied) cue. Critical to this interpretation is the assumption that suppression practice is necessary. A series of interference paradigms, which do not involve suppression practice and which are structurally similar to the think/no-think paradigm, provide evidence against the inhibition interpretation. Additional evidence against inhibition derives from our demonstrations herewith that the findings from the think/no-think paradigm can be replicated without any apparent suppression requirement. Furthermore, the results from all of these paradigms can be explained by the same simple principle. Namely, that when an item exists in an extended associative network, strengthening the item makes it interfere with the recall of other items in the network.