Explanations of forgetting:interference

Question 1

One strength of interference

Answer 1

P- real -world evidence of interference effects in more everyday situations
E- baddeley and hitch (1977) asked rugby players to recall the names of teams played against during season
E- players all played for the same interval (number of intervening games varied as some players missed matches)
E- players who played the most games(most interference with memory) had the poorest recall
T- interference can operate in at least some real-world situations increasing the validity of the theory.
CP- interfere may cause some forgetting in everyday situations but very unusual, as the conditions necessary for interference to occur are relatively rare
CPT- most forgetting may be better explained by other theories such as retrieval failure due to lack of cues

Question 2

One limitation of interference

Answer 2

P- interference is temporary and can be overcome by using cues
E- tulving and psotka(1971) gave participants lists of words organised into categories
E-recall averaged about 70% for the first list, but became progressively worse as participants learned an additional list(proactive interference)
E-but had the words really disappeared from ltm or were they still available?
E- at the end participants were given a cued recall, recall rose to about 70%
T- inteterfence causes a temporary loss of accessibility to material that is still in ltm, a finding not predicted by interference theory

Question 3

One strength of interference

Answer 3

P- evidence of retrograde facilitation
E- coenen and van(1997) gave participants a list of words and to recall, assuming the intervening experiences act as a interference
E- found that when a list of words was learned under the influence of the drug diazepam, recall one week later was poor(compared with the control group)
E- BUT when list was learned before drug was taken, later recall was better than placebo = so drug improved recall of materials learned beforehand
E- John(2004) drug prevents new information reaching parts of the brain involved in processing memories, so cannot interference retroactively with information already stored
T- forgetting can be due to inference - reduce the inference and you reduce the forgetting