Effects of isolation by color on mentally retarded and nonretarded persons' recall of printed words.

Mentally retarded and nonretarded persons of equal mental age read lists of nine nouns presented simultaneously in a horizontal format. In the control condition all words were colored blue; in the experimental condition the fifth word was colored red (isolated). Recall of items when isolated was reliably higher than when not isolated for both groups. The proportion of fifth-position items recalled compared with total recall was almost identical for both groups whether or not the items were isolated. Results were discussed in terms of interference theory and the pedagogical implications of superior recall of words isolated by color.