... threes from, again in time with the metronome. When a set signal was given the participant ceased counting and attempted to recall the original consonant trigram. In this experiment the counting was used as a distracter task which would prevent rehearsal of the original trigram by the participant (numbers were used instead of letters to avoid retroactive interference). Various different retention intervals were tested, ranging from three to eighteen seconds in length. The results showed that if the recall was only three seconds after presentation, the participant accurately recalled the trigram 80% of the time. At nine seconds this accuracy dropped dramatically to 25 %, and at 18 seconds it was only 10%. Peterson and Peterson said that this showed that memory data is lost very quickly due to the passage of time alone (rather than associative interference) without rehearsal or the opportunity for semantic encoding. Moreover they said that ...

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