Explanations for forgetting: Interference Flashcards
Explain what is meant by ‘interference’
An explanation for forgetting in terms of one memory disrupting the ability to recall another. This is most likely to occur when the two memories have some similarity
Explain what is meant by the term ‘proactive interference’
Past learning interferes with current attempt to learn something
Explain what is meant by the term ‘retroactive interference’
Current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning
How did Georg Muller and his student first identify retroactive interference?
- they gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes and then after a retention interval, asked participants to recall the lists.
- performance was less good if there was an intervening task between initial learning and recall.
- the intervening task produced RI because the later task interfered with what had previously been learned
What did Benton Underwood (1957) find about proactive interference?
- found when participants had to learn a series of word lists they do not learn the lists of words encountered later on in the sequence or earlier on
- Found = if participants memorised 10 or more lists, after 24 hours recall = 20%.
If they only memorised one list, recall = over 70%. - this is explained by proactive interference because each list makes it harder to learn subsequent lists.
Who studied the effects of similarity of materials?
McGeoh and McDonald (1931)
What did McGeoh and McDonald (1931) find about the effects of similarity of materials?
- If List B was a list of synonyms of List A, recall was poor (12%)
- If List B was nonsense syllabus it had less effect
- If List B was numbers this had the least effect (37% recall)
- This shows that inference is the strongest the more similar the items are. Only interference, rather than decay, can explain such effects.
