Explanations for forgettin: Interference Flashcards
What is retroactive interference?
When current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning
What is proactive interference?
Past learning interfers with current attempts to learn something
Who first identified retroactive interference?
Georg Muller
What did Georg Muller do to test retroactive interference?
- Participants had a list of nonsense syllables
- They learnt for 6 minutes
- Retention interval
- Then asked to recall
What where the results of Muller test on retroactive interference?
- Performance was less good if participants had been given an intervening task between intitial learning and recall
What where some participants asked to do between the initial learning and recall?
They were shown three landscpe paintings and asked to describe them
What did Underwood (1957) show?
Proactive interference could be equally significant
What is proactive interference?
Past learning interferes with current attemots to learn something
What did Underwood (1957) analyse?
Findings from a number of studies
What did Underwood (1957) conclude?
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
What did Underwood (1957) find?
- 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%
What did McGeoch and McDonald (1931) experiment with?
The effects of similarity of materials
What did McGeoch and McDonald (1931) do in their experiments?
- 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
What were the results?
- 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
What did McGeoch and McDonald’s results show?
Interference is strongest the more similar the items are
What did Baddeley and Hitch (1977) investigate?
Interference effects in an everyday setting of rugby player recalling the names of the teams they had played against over a rugby season
What was the difference between the rugby players?
Some played in all the games
Some missed a few due to injury
What did Baddeley and Hitch (1977) find?
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
Research is quite artificial
Mundane realism
The lists are not what you see everyday
Rugby players
Accessibility versus availability
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
Real-world application to advertising
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
