A reconsideration of the extinction-recovery theory

The extinction-recovery theory, which has been offered to account for the superior retention of paired-associate lists learned under distributed practice (DP), was tested in three experiments. These studies showed that (a) prior-list availability is unaffected by DP, (b) the DP effect is largely due to increased availability, and (c) a DP effect can occur under conditions of minimal interlist interference. These findings were considered severely damaging to the theory. The results of these and other studies were interpreted in terms of the operation of a selection process by which DP Ss are able to acquire a collection of relatively stable and strong associations.