RACE for retrieval: Competitive effects in memory retrieval

When a question is stated such as “What is the capital of Australia?”, various answers start competing for retrieval from declarative memory. If a hint is given during this retrieval process (“The name of the capital begins with the letter C.”), retrieval may be facilitated, but if a distractor is presented (“Amsterdam”), retrieval may be inhibited. A well-known example of these kinds of effects is Picture-Word Interference, a task similar to the Stroop-task (Glaser & Dungelhoff, 1984; Glaser & Glaser, 1989; Schriefers et al., 1990). In these tasks, it has been shown that SOAs have differential effects. For example, presenting a drawing that depicts a concept 50 ms after a word-form of that concept has appeared, speeds up processing of that word in comparison with a neutral condition, whereas in other conditions SOAs might have a negative effect. The ACT-R Latency Equation as it is defined now,