Interference research studies

Retroactive interference:

Underwood and Postman:

Aim:

to find out if new learning interferes with previous learning

Procedure:

• participants were divided into two groups
• group A were asked to learn a word list of word pairs
    * e.g. cat-tree
• they were then asked to learn a second list of word pairs where the second paired word was different
    * e.g. cat-glass
• group B were asked to learn the first list of word pairs only
• both groups were asked to recall the first list of word pairs

Findings:

group B recall of the first list was more accurate than the recall of group A

Conclusion:

this suggests that learning items in the second list interference with participants’ ability to recall the list

• this is an example of retroactive interference

Interference:

McGeoch and McDonald

Aim:

to investigate the effect of similarity on interference

Procedure:

• all participants learnt word list until 100% recall
• 6 groups of participants learnt the second list
    * synonyms
    * antonyms
    * unrelated
    * nonsense syllables
    * 3 digit numbers
    * no new list
• then all participants were asked to recall the original list

Findings:

the worst recalls = synonyms (same meanings)

Conclusion:

interference is strongest when memories are similar

Baddeley and Hitch:

• they asked rugby players to recall the names of teams recently played
• for various reasons including and suspensions, most players they interviewed had missed some games, so for one player the last game might have been last week, while for another it was two months ago
• Baddeley and Hitch found that recall for the last game was equally good whether the game was played some time ago or last week
• this shows that incorrect recall was not due to decay but was related to the number of intervening games
• this demonstrates that interference is a reason for forgetting in our everyday life

This demonstrates that interference is a reason forgetting in our everyday life