Interference Flashcards
Name one limitation of the interference explanation ?
P - one limitation is that research to support it is quite artificial meaning it faces validity issues
E - lab studies of interference have tight control of confounding variables , however , most research is unlike everyday forgetting - in everyday life we often learn something and recall it much later
E - this means that because research is mostly lab-based it may overestimate the importance of interference as a cause of forgetting
Name one strength of the explanation of interference ?
P - one strength is some support for interference in real-world situations
E - Baddeley + Hitch asked rugby players to recall the names of the teams they had played against during a rugby season - players did not play the same number of games - those who played most had the poorest recall (most interference)
E - this shows that interference operates in some everyday situations , increasing the validity of the theory
Name another limitation of the explanation of interference ?
P - one limitation is interference only explains some situations of forgetting
E - even though interference does occur in everyday life it doesn’t explain all forgetting from day to day - special conditions are required for interference to lead to forgetting - the two memories need to be similar - it is for this reason that interference is considered to be relatively unimportant explanation
E - therefore , how much forgetting can be attributed to interference remains unclear
Name another strength of the explanation of interference?
P - another strength is support from drug studies
E - material learned that just before taking diazepam recalled better than a placebo group one week later - this is retrograde facilitation - the drug stopped new info reaching brain areas that process memories, so couldn’t retroactively interfere with stored info
E - this shows that the forgetting is due to interference - reducing the interference reduced the forgetting
What is 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 on similarity
What is proactive interference ?
Past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something - Underwood showed that PI could be equally significant - he analysed past experiences + concluded that when participants were given a series of word lists to learn they do not learn the lists of words encountered later as well as the lists of words encountered earlier on.
What is retroactive interference ?
Current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning - Muller was first to identify RI - they gave a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 mins then, after retention interval , asked participants to recall the list - performance was less good when they were given an intervening tasks between initial learning and recall - the intervening task showed that the present learning was interfering with the past learning
What is the similarity of the test materials ?
McGeoch and McDonald experimented with effects of similarity between materials
They gave participants a list of 10 adjectives (list A)
Once they learned there was a resting interval by which they learned list B , followed by recall
If list B was synonyms of list A recall was poor
If list B was nonsense syllabus this had less effect
This shows that interference is strongest the more similar items are
