Explanations for forgettin: Interference

Question 1

What is retroactive interference?

Answer 1

When current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning

Question 2

What is proactive interference?

Answer 2

Past learning interfers with current attempts to learn something

Question 3

Who first identified retroactive interference?

Answer 3

Georg Muller

Question 4

What did Georg Muller do to test retroactive interference?

Answer 4

• Participants had a list of nonsense syllables
• They learnt for 6 minutes
• Retention interval
• Then asked to recall

Question 5

What where the results of Muller test on retroactive interference?

Answer 5

• Performance was less good if participants had been given an intervening task between intitial learning and recall

Question 6

What where some participants asked to do between the initial learning and recall?

Answer 6

They were shown three landscpe paintings and asked to describe them

Question 7

What did Underwood (1957) show?

Answer 7

Proactive interference could be equally significant

Question 8

What is proactive interference?

Answer 8

Past learning interferes with current attemots to learn something

Question 9

What did Underwood (1957) analyse?

Answer 9

Findings from a number of studies

Question 10

What did Underwood (1957) conclude?

Answer 10

When participants have to learn a series of words they do not learn the list of words encountered later on in the sequence as well as lists of words encountered earlier on

Question 11

What did Underwood (1957) find?

Answer 11

• If participants memoried 10 or more lists
• Then after 24 hrs
• They remembered 20% of what they learnt
• If they only learnt one list recall was over 70%

Question 12

What did McGeoch and McDonald (1931) experiment with?

Answer 12

The effects of similarity of materials

Question 13

What did McGeoch and McDonald (1931) do in their experiments?

Answer 13

• Participants had a list of 10 adjectives List A
• Then there was a resting interval of 10 minutes
• During 10 minutes they learnt List B

Question 14

What were the results?

Answer 14

• If List B was a list of synonyms of List A
  > Recall was poor (12%)
• If List B was nonsense syllabus this had less effect
  > 26% recall
• If List B was numbers this had the least effect
  > 37% recall

Question 15

What did McGeoch and McDonald’s results show?

Answer 15

Interference is strongest the more similar the items are

Question 16

What did Baddeley and Hitch (1977) investigate?

Answer 16

Interference effects in an everyday setting of rugby player recalling the names of the teams they had played against over a rugby season

Question 17

What was the difference between the rugby players?

Answer 17

Some played in all the games

Some missed a few due to injury

Question 18

What did Baddeley and Hitch (1977) find?

Answer 18

All players should recall a similar percentage of the games played because time alone causes forgetting
Players who played in more games should forget more due to interference

Question 19

Research is quite artificial

Answer 19

Mundane realism
The lists are not what you see everyday
Rugby players

Question 20

Accessibility versus availability

Answer 20

Interference effects actually cause memories to disappear or interference is temporary
Ceraso ( 1967) memory tested after 24 hrs, recognition (accessibility) showed recovery
Whereas recall availability remained the same
This suggests that interference occurs because memories are temporarily not accessible rather than have been lost.
Research supports that the view that interference affacts availability rather than accessibility

Question 21

Real-world application to advertising

Answer 21

Research on the effects of interference when people are exposed to adverts from competing brands within a short time period
- Danaher et al. (2008) recall and recognition of an advertiser’s message were impaired when exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week
- One strategy might be to enhance the memory trace by running multiple exposures to an advertisement on one day rather than spread these out over a week
This results in reduced interference from competitor’s advertisements
Showing how interference research can help advertisers maximise the effectiveness of their campaigns and target their spending most effectively