Effects of learning experience on forgetting rates of item and associative memories

Are associative memories forgotten more quickly than item memories, and does the level of original learning differentially influence forgetting rates? In this study, we addressed these questions by having participants learn single words and word pairs once (Experiment 1), three times (Experiment 2), and six times (Experiment 3) in a massed learning (ML) or a distributed learning (DL) mode. Then they were tested for item and associative...