Interference Flashcards
How is interference caused?
By two memories competing with one another, the more similar the memories the greater the risk of interference
What are the two types of interference?
- Proactive
- Retroactive
What is proactive interference?
When older memories interfere with our recall of newer memories
What is an example of proactive interference?
Remember the names of your old friends but forget the names of new friends
What is retroactive interference?
When new information interferes with our recall of older memories
What is an example or retroactive interference?
Remember names of new classmates, can’t remember names of old classmates
What did Baddeley and Hitch investigate?
Whether interference was a better explanation for forgetting than the passage of time, they investigated this with a rugby team
What was Baddeley and Hitch’s procedure?
Asked the players to name the teams they had played that season in each weekly fixture, because most the teams b had missed some games
What did Baddeley and Hitch’s study produce?
A naturally occurring independent variable where some participants had memories from longer ago but with no new information to interfere in this time
What were the results of the rugby study?
Showed that players recall was affected much more by the number of teams that had played then the passage of time
What are 3 evaluation points of the rugby study?
- Can apply to some everyday situations
- May be better explained by other theories
- Some do not have the same motivation to recall
What did McGeoch and McDonald aim to do?
To test whether similarity effects recall, specifically looking at retroactive interference
What did participants have to do?
Learn a list of 10 words until they could remember them with 100% accuracy, after this they were given a different list, there were 6 groups
What were the 6 groups in McGeoch and McDonald’s study?
1) Lists were synononyms
2) Anyonyms
3) Unreleated words
4) Nonsense syllables
5) Three digit numbers
6) No second list
What were the findings?
When asked to recall the first word list pps performance depended on the second list they had been given. Pps performed worsgvwhen the words were not similar in meaning
