Word length effects are not due to proactive interference
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In immediate serial recall short words are better recalled than long words. The word length effect has become pivotal in the development of short-term memory models. The current research tests one explanation of the word length effect; that it is related to proactive interference (PI). We report two experiments in which the relationship is directly tested. In the first experiment we show that word length effects can be observed over the first few trials in an experiment and that the effect shows itself primarily in the number of omissions made. In the second experiment we simultaneously test for PI and word length effects. Strong word length effects were present but there was little evidence for PI influencing either overall levels of recall or the word length effect. In short, no empirical support was found for PI as an explanation of the word length effect.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it