Interference theory Flashcards
Who conducted RTS?
McGeoch and Mcdonald
What did McGeoch and Mcdonald do?
They gave participants a list of 10 words to learn and they had to learn the list until they could remember with 100% accuracy. They then had to learn list b. They had to recall list A.
What did McGeoch and Mcdonald find?
That if list b was a list of similiar meaning words to list a, recall was poor however if they were different recall was higher - supporting interference theory
What is a strength of McGeoch and Mcdonald’s research?
It is high in reliability
Why is M&M’s research high in reliability?
It was conducted in a controlled lab setting and therefore can be repeated in the same conditions e.g giving each participant the same time to learn the word list to gain consistent results
What does m&m’s research lack?
Mundane realism
Why does it lack mundane realism?
An artificial task of learning a list of words was used
What does a lack of mundane realism make it hard to do?
Difficult to generalise the findings to real life examples of forgetting as the research does not reflect what we would try to remember in everyday life such as birthdays, faces etc, maybe these memories are less likely to be contaminated as they are more meaningful to us
What did Baddeley and Hitch do?
They asked rugby players to recall the names of the teams they had played against over a rugby season. The players all played for the same time interval however some players had played all the games, some not due to injury.
What did Baddeley and Hitch find?
They found that players who had played more games forgot proportionally more games than those who had played fewer games.
Why does Baddeley’s research support the interference theory?
Because it demonstrates that the games became confused in memory and therefore less were likely to be recalled, rather than being due to the amount of time that had passed
