Interference- forgetting

Forgetting

A person’s loss of the ability to recall or recognise something that they have previously learned

Interference

When 2 memories become mixed up, confused or interfere with each other so that one or other of the memories becomes distorted or forgotten, cannot be recalled. this is more likely to occur when the two memories are similar.

proactive interference

involves old information affecting new information

retroactive interference

involves new information affecting old information

Research support- retroactive interference

Georg Müller and Pilzecker (1900)

• first to identify retroactive interference

• they gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 mins and then after a retention interval P’s were asked to recall the lists

• performance was less good if P’s had been given an intervening task between initial learning and recall

• the intervening task produced RI because the later task interfered with what had previously been learnt

Research support- proactive interference

Benton Underwood (1957)

• showed that proactive interference could be equally significant

• analysed the findings from a number of studies and concluded that when P’s have to learn a series of word lists they do not learn the lists of words encountered later on the the sequence as well as lists of words encountered earlier on

• found that if P’s memorised 10 or more lists then after 34 hrs they remembered about 20% of what they learned

• if they only learned 1 list recall was over 70%

Research support- similarity of test materials

McGeoch and McDonald (1931)

• experimented with the effects of similarity of materials

• they gave p’s a list of 10 objectives- once these were learned there was then a resting interval of 10 mins during which they learned List B followed by recall

• if List B was of a list of synonyms of List A recall was poor (12%); if list B was nonsense syllabus this had less effect (26% recall)

• this shows that interference is strongest the more similar the items are

• only interference rather than decay can explain such effect

Options for evaluation

1. demonstrated in artificial lab conditions which rarely occur in everyday life

2. interference doesn't cause true forgetting- only a temporary loss of accessibility

3. individual differences