Evaluation For Interference Flashcards
Underwood and postman
Participants were divided into two groups. Group A were asked to learn a list of words e.g. cat tree then they were asked to learn a second list cat-glass. Group B were only asked to learn the first list of word pairs. Both groups were asked to recall the first list. Group B recall was more accurate than group A. This is an example of retroactive interference
- lack of mundane realism
- lab based
Baddeley and hitch
examined rugby union players who had played every match in the season and players who had missed some games due to injury. The players were asked to recall the names of the teams they had played against earlier in the season. Baddeley and Hitch found that players who had played the most games forgot proportionately more games than those who had played fewer games due to injury. These results support the idea of retroactive inference, as the learning of new information (new team names) interfered with the memory of old information (earlier team names)
Lab setting
- One major weakness with interference theory is the interference effects are more evident in laboratory-based settings using various memory-based tasks. These setups lack ecological validity and also mundane realism as the tasks are rarely indicative of what people would experience in real-life situations. Therefore it makes it difficult to generalise the findings externally beyond the laboratory settings or understand exactly how much day-to-day forgetting can be credited to interference or even forgetting in general.
Mcdonald
One study where the effects of interference was studied was by McDonald. He gave participants list A and asked them to remember them gave them list B and asked them to remember. Recall decreased by 12% when the words were synonyms therefore this supports that interference is most likely to happen with similar material.
Evaluation studies for interference
Baddeley and hitch
Underwood and postman
McDonald
