Forgetting Flashcards
In the context of forgetting, what is interference?
Interference occurs when information that is similar in format gets in the way of the information that someone is trying to recall.
Two types of interference: proactive and retroactive.
What is retrieval failure?
Where the information is in long-term memory, but cannot be accessed.
What is a cue?
A trigger of information that allows us to access a memory.
Research study to support proactive interference.
Keppel and Underwood.
Participants were presented with meaningless 3- letter consonant trigrams at different intervals. To prevent rehearsal the participants had to count backwards in threes before recalling. Keppel and Underwood found that participants typically remembered the trigrams that were presented first, irrespective of the interval length.
Research study for retroactive interference.
Wixted retroactive interference is a non- linear maximum function of the onset time point of post- learning distractors.
Research study for retrieval due to absence of cues.
Godden and Baddeley concluded that the mismatch between the external cues available at learning and recall led to retrieval failure.
This study demonstrates context- dependent forgetting as the difficulty of recall increases due to the lack of external cues in the setting (context).
Use your knowledge of explanations for forgetting to explain why Robert has trouble learning French and Spanish at the same time.
Memories encoded in long- term memory are forgotten and cannot be retrieved into short-term memory because either memory could interfere with the other.
Learning Spanish and French is interfering with each other and causing him to forget words and sentences in both languages.
