Task Experience Diminishes Proactive Interference by Increasing Sustained Attention

Proactive interference from prior associations impairs memory for related information withchanged features. However, experience with proactive interference can diminish its effects. Weexamined whether this diminishment occurs because participants learn to sustain their attentionto detect and later remember changes. Participants (n = 445) completed two cycles of an A-B, ADtask, each with unique items. The study phases included word pairs with cues that repeated (A)and responses that changed (B → D) from the first to the second half of the lists, along withcontrol items (A-D) that only appeared in the second half of the study lists. Sustained attentionwas assessed using intermittent thought probes that required participants to report theirattentional states (on-task, task-related, off-task) for the A-B and A-D pairs that appearedimmediately before the probes. The test phases included a cued recall test that assessed memoryfor recent responses (D), intrusions of first responses (B), memory for changes, and memory forfirst responses (B). Across cycles, proactive interference diminished, and on-task reportsindicating attentive encoding increased selectively for A-D pairs. Within participants, on-taskreports to A-B and A-D pairs were associated with higher rates of recent-response recalls,memory for changes, and first-response recalls. Between participants, total on-task reportsindicating trait-level sustained attention predicted more accurate memory; this associationincreased across cycles and was driven by people with better sustained attention. These resultssuggest that experience reduced interference by promoting strategic attention allocation, whichimproved memory for similar events and their changed temporal contexts.