Interference - explanation of forgetting

Question 1

What is forgetting?

Answer 1

• a persons loss of the ability to recall or recognise something they have previously learned

Question 2

What is interference?

Answer 2

An explanation of forgetting in terms of one memory disrupting the ability to recall another. This is most likely to occur when the two memories have some similarity

Question 3

What is retroactive interference?

Answer 3

Learning new things interferes with the old memories/old things

Question 4

What was Müller’s study on the effects of retroactive interference?

Answer 4

• gave participants nonsense syllables to learn
• given interval / gap before recall
• group 1: asked to describe landscape pictures during interval
• group 2: not shown landscape pictures
• recall of list was worse in those shown the paintings (less good recall if there is an intervening task)
• shows that the intervening task caused retroactive interference because they couldn’t remember what they learned before

Question 5

What is proactive interference?

Answer 5

Past learning interferes with new learning

Question 6

What was Underwood’s study on proactive interference?

Answer 6

• participants asked to learn lists of words
• found that participants don’t learn the lists of words given later on as well as they learn the lists of words given earlier
• if asked to learn 10+ lists, after 24 hours, they forgot 80% of the info
• if there was only one list they only forgot about 30%
• this shows that too much new info can result in proactive interference which leads to forgetting

Question 7

What was McGeoch and McDonald’s study about interference and similarity, which showed that interference was a more likely cause of forgetting than decay, because the type of interfering information matters?

Answer 7

• word lists: list A was learnt by all participants
• participants split into 3 groups and given list B, then asked to recall list A
• list B was split into three types of different word lists, it was either
- synonyms of words in list A (similar words)
- nonsense words/jibberish
- numbers
• found that similar words led to more forgetting of list A (12% recall), less effect with jibberish words (26% recall), least effect with numbers (37% recall)

Question 8

What was Baddely and Hitch’s interference study in an everyday setting regarding rugby players who were asked to recall all the other rugby teams they had played against?

Answer 8

• rugby players who all had the same season length (start of the season until the end), but had different intervening games (some had missed games due to illness, injury etc)
• decay theory suggests that time should cause decaying, and since they all had the same length of season they should all have similar results
• interference theory suggests that the more games played per player = more forgetting because of interference.This is what happened

Question 9

Criticisms of the interference theory

other than:

the retrieval failure explanation of forgetting

e.g) effects may just be temporary: tests again later on suggest info is just temporarily inaccessible/unretrievable rather than complete gone/unavailable

Answer 9

• Kane and Engle - individual differences regarding the effects of proactive interference (some people are impacted more)
• low ecological validity: research is often lab-based using nonsense syllables - not everyday memory use, may result in a lack of motivation from participants to truly learn words, meaning the effects shown are greater than they actually are
• Anderson - theory is vague & conditional e.g the memories need to be similar, may not be the most important cause of forgetting