Reasons for forgetting

there are three types of interference 

•  Retroactive interference  

• attempt to learn new information interfere with past learning (ie. Remembering names)  

• Forgetting what someone's hair used to look like  before they had it cut  

  • Retro - old 

  • Muller (1900) was one of the first psychologists to identify the effects of RI  

  • He asked students to learn a list of nonsense syllables for 6 minutes 

  • After a retention interval the students had to recall them  

  • Performance was poorer for the students who were given an interference task (being asked to describe a painting) 

• Proactive Interference  

• previous learning interferes with attempts to learn something new (I.e your first language makes it harder to learn another language) 

• Reordering what is in your kitchen drawers and continuously going to the old one  

  • Underwood (1957) suggested that PI can have just as significant effect on memory as RI 

  • He found that participants could recall earlier information a lot more accurately than new information, and that memory was weakened the more they had to try and recall it.  

  • Participants could remember over 70% after just one list but after 10 or more lists this dropped to below 26%  

• Similarity – interference is more likely to occur when the two memories are very similar (e.g two names pronounced differently but spelt the same) 

• Mixing up the plots of the books I study in English  

  • McGeoch and McDonald (1931) 

  • Participants had to learn a list of 10 words until they were 100% accurate  

  • They were then divided into 6 conditions where they had to learn a different list: 

    • Synonyms, antonyms, unrelated words 

    • Nonsense syllables, three digit numbers, no new list  

  • Participants performance in recalling the original list depended on the nature of the second list with the synonym group performing the worst