Explanations for forgetting: interference Flashcards
What is interference
An explanation for forgetting in terms of one memory disrupting the ability to recall another
What are the two types of interference?
Proactive
Retroactive
What is retroactive interference?
Current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning.
Retroactive interference research
Who? Muller
What? gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes and then, after a retention interval, asked participants to recall the lists.
Findings? Performance was worse if participants had been given an intervening task between initial learning and recall (they were shown three landscape paintings and asked to describe them).
Why? The intervening task produced RI because the later task (describing pictures) interfered with what had previously been learned.
What is proactive interference?
Past learning interferes with current attempts
to learn something.
Proactive interference research?
Who? Underwood:
What? analysed the findings from a number of studies and concluded that when participants have to learn a series of word lists they do not learn the lists of words encountered later on in the sequence as well as lists of words encountered earlier on.
Findings? Overall, Underwood found that, if participants memorised 10 or more lists, then, after 24 hours, they remembered about 20% of what they learned. If they only learned one list recall was over 70%.
Why? This is explained by proactive interference because each list makes it harder to learn subsequent lists.
AO3 interference
lim: artificial research
lim: limited explanation
str: RWA
lim: ind diffs
Interference lim: artificial research
Issue w methodology of the studies
Most of this research has often used rather artificial lists of words and/or nonsense syllables. Thus the findings may not relate to everyday uses of memory, which tends not to involve word lists.
In addition, participants may lack motivation to remember the links in such studies, and this may allow interference effects to appear stronger than they really are.
This means that the research is low in ecological validity, although the counterargument is that interference effects have been observed in everyday situations.
Interference lim: limited explanation
Interference only explains some situations of forgetting
Rather special conditions are required for interference to lead to forgetting - the two memories need to be quite similar.
For this reason interference is considered a relatively unimportant explanation for everyday forgetting.
Anderson: there is no doubt that interference plays a role in forgetting, but how much forgetting can be attributed to interference remains unclear.
This means that other theories are needed to provide a complete explanation of forgetting. Therefore it is an incomplete explanation
Interference str: RWA
RWA: advertising
Danaher: found that both recall and recognition of an advertiser’s message were impaired when participants were exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week.
They suggest that 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 competitors’ advertisements.
This shows how interference research can help advertisers maximise the effectiveness of their campaigns and target their spending most effectively.
Interference lim: Individual differences
There is evidence that some people are less affected by proactive
interference than others.
Kane and Engle: demonstrated that individuals with a greater working memory span were less susceptible to proactive interference.
The researchers tested this by giving participants three word lists to learn. Those participants with low working memory spans showed greater proactive interference when recalling the second and third lists than did participants with higher spans.
A further test suggested that having a greater working memory span meant having greater resources to consciously control processing and counteract the effects of proactive interference.
Shows the role that individual diffs play in how ppl are affected by interference
