Explanations for forgetting: Interference and retrieval failure Flashcards
What is proactive interference?
It involves memory impairment for something we have learned over other learning that occurred, old information interferes with the new information.
What did Jacoby et al say about proactive interference?
Proactive interference occurs because of competition between the strength of the old learning and the weakness of the new learning. If you try to use a new password for an online transaction the strength of an old password will interfere and you lose the recall of the old one.
What is retroactive interference?
Where new information interferes with the old information
What did underwood say about retroactive interference?
Showed that participants who were repeatedly asked to learn series of word lists made far more errors as the number of lists increased. As the participants made more errors in the word lists shown at the end of the study it shows how old information was interfering with the new information.
What did Schmidt et al say about retroactive interference?
Collected a sample of 211 former students and participants were asked to remember street names
It was concluded that learning new street names made recalling old street names more difficult which demonstrates that retroactive interference plays a role in forgetting.
What is a challenge of explanations of forgetting?
It fails to explain most cases of forgetting in real life.
The explanations are limited due to the focus on interference of very similar types of information which is not comparative to a lot of real-life situations where we are not juggling with similar material and fail to remember it.
What did Tulving find out about cues
Found the ESP (encoding specificity principles). This states that a cue is going to help us remember information; it has to be present during encoding
What is state dependant forgetting?
Internal cues, that are different during encoding information and retrieving it. (Encoded information drunk vs the next day)
What is context dependent forgetting?
External cues that are different when encoding information and when retrieving it. (college vs home)
What did Godden and Baddeley say about context dependent forgetting?
Studied deep water diver retrieving information on and off land learning a list of 36 words.
Land on land 37%
Land on water 24%
Water on land 23%
Water on water 32%
