Interference theory notes:

Evaluation cues  

Notes  

Why don’t we forget?

Why does interference cause forgetting?

What makes interference more or less likely?

Outline proactive interference

Outline retroactive interference

According to interference theory, forgetting does not occur because information is lost from long-term memory. Instead, we forget because we are unable to access the information.

Interference theory says that we forget because of interference between separate pieces of information stored in long-term memory. This interference means we retrieve the wrong information and fail to retrieve the right information.

The level of interference can be affected by the similarity of the information—the more similar it is, the more interference occurs. The temporal gap between when the two sets of information are learned also matters(learning names for cousins ; chibuzor) : the shorter the gap, the more interference.

One type of interference effect is proactive interference. This occurs when information from an older memory -2024 interferes with a newer memory- 2025, meaning we retrieve the old memory by accident (writing wrong year in our books), causing us to forget the new one.

An example of proactive interference (old affecting new) is a language student who is fluent in Italian and is learning Spanish but sometimes says Italian words by mistake (old knowledge- italian interfering with new knowledge -spanish).

This is an example of proactive interference because older Italian vocabulary interferes with learning new Spanish words.

Another type of interference effect is retroactive interference (new interferes with old). This occurs when information from a newer memory interferes with an older memory, meaning we retrieve the new memory by accident and forget the old one.

An example of retroactive interference is a pianist learning a new piece of music who then makes mistakes when playing an older, familiar piece.

This is an example of retroactive interference because the newly learned music interferes with memory of the older one.