Interference as an explination of forgetting Flashcards
Who initially identified interference as a form of forgetting
Georg Muller
What did Georg Muller do in his study
He gave participants a list of nonsense sylablles to memorise, and after a retention interval asked the participants to recall the lists. Performance deteriorated if the participants were given a task between learning and recall.
Why did participants in Georg Muller’s study perform worse when given a task between learning and recall
The task created retroactive interference because the later task interfered with the information they had previously learned.
What are the two types of interference
Retroactive interference and Proactive Interference
What is retroactive interference
New learning interfereing with the old
What is proactive interference
When past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something
What test did McGeoch and McDonald run
They gave participants a list of 10 adjectives to learn, List A, and were then given a 10 minute resting interval in which they learned another list, List B. They found that if List B were synonyms of List A, recall was poor at 12%. If list B was nonesense recall was better, at 26%, and if List B were numbers this had the least effect, with recall rising to 37%. Showed interference stronger with more similar items
Who ran a test of interference with synonyms, nonsense and numbers
McGeoch and McDonald
Who did a study into the real life influence of interference
Baddely and Hitch
How did Baddely and Hitch perform a study into a real life case of interference forgetting
Baddeley and Hitch interviewed rugby players to see if they remembered the names of all the teams they played against that season, and found that players who played in every game forgot proportionally more than those who missed some games
What is a real life application of interference forgetting
A real life application of research into interference is in advertising. It is particularly interesting to advertisers as people can be exposed to messages from competing brands in a short space of time. Danaher found that recall and recognition of an advertisers message was negatively impacted when participants were exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week. He suggested that the optimal strategy was to run multiple exposures to an advertisement on one day rather than spreading it our over a week.
Who did research on advertising and interference forgetting
Danaher
What is an issue with the type of research done in interference forgetting
Conditions used to conduct research are often quite artificial, with lots of research using artificial lists of words or nonsense syllables. Additionally participants may not be motivated to memorise random words so interference effects may appear stronger than they actually are.
What is an issue with the use of interference forgetting
It cannot explain all occurances of forgetting. Interferece does occur in everyday life, but not nearly enough that it’s an important explination to everyday forgetting. The conditons for forgettig are quite specific, with the memories having to be similar, which doesn’t happen that often. It is unclear how much of forgetting can be attributed to interference
How do individual differences effect proactive interference
Kane and Engle demonstrated that those with a greater working memory span were less susceptible to proactive interference. In order to do this they gave participants three lists of words to learn, and those with low working memory spans showed more interference on the second and third lists. Greater working memory spans were able to counteract the effects of proactive interference
Who did a test on people with worse working memory spans and proactive interference
Kane and Engle
