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By 1910, Freud assumed that adult repression occurs largely because a connection is established 'between what has already been repressed [in childhood] and what is to be repressed'. A strong tendency to use the defense of repression would imply, perhaps, a strong predilection to fuse memory traces with one another—what the cognitive style investigators at Topeka would call 'assimilative interaction'. This group has previously demonstrated that the tendency to fuse memory traces indiscriminately exists as a stable, enduring style of thinking in many people. It is called 'leveling', in contrast to an opposite style, 'sharpening', in which the tendency is to remember clearly, without contaminations. Ten extreme levelers and ten extreme sharpeners were selected by appropriate means. Independently another group of workers used Rorschach protocols of these same twenty subjects and selected six from the group who appeared to rely 'primarily upon repression'. All six turned out to be extreme levelers. Holzman suggests that the 'most plausible' explanation is that the process of repression 'makes use of leveling dynamics', i.e., that the cognitive style of fusing memory traces indiscriminately can be used to eliminate memory traces by 'assimilation' with already repressed memory traces.