Memory - Forgetting– interference Flashcards
What is meant by forgetting?
Long-term memories are not always remembered and forgetting can occur for variety of different reasons.
What do psychologists believe about forgetting?
Once information has reached LTM, it is permanent but problems occur with assessing the information.
What is the definition of interference?
When two pieces of information conflict with each other, this can result in forgetting one or both pieces of information or a distortion of memory.
What are the two types of interference?
Retroactive interference.
Proactive interference.
What is retroactive interference and give an example?
When a newer memory interferes with an older one, e.g. a teacher has learnt so many names this year that they struggle to remember their students names from last year.
What is proactive interference and give an example?
This occurs when an older memory interferes with a newer one e.g. a teacher has learnt so many names in the past that they struggled to remember their students names from this year.
What was McGeoch & McDonald study into reactive interference?
This changed the amount of similarity between two sets of materials which participants had to recall participants had to learn a list of words until they could remember it with 100% accuracy.
They learn a new list of:
1. Synonyms.
2. Antonyms.
3. Unrelated words.
4. Consonant syllables.
5. Digit numbers.
6. No list.
What were the findings of the study?
Synonyms = 12% accurate recall of the original list.
Syllables = 26% recall.
Numbers = 37% recall.
What was the conclusion of the study into retractive interference?
The study shows that interference is strongest when the more similar the words are.
What is the effects of similarity?
The effect of similarity can be because of proactive interference as previously stored information makes it harder to store new similar information or because retroactive interference in that new information writes over old.
What is the limitation of interference as an explanation of forgetting?
Most of the research for proactive and retroactive interference is conducted in a lab and the results don’t have ecological validity – many studies involve learning a list of meaningless words. Participants are required to learn and recall them in a short time frame allowing a much greater chance of interference which is far from real life accounts such as remembering personally significant dates -as task such as learning list of words lack mundane realism the results may be different. How memory works in the real world - the lab studies should be generalised with caution and the artificiality of the task needs to be considered.
What is a strength of the theory of interference?
Findings have been found to be very reliable new research has been conducted in real life and interestingly the studies will still find the same result - Baddeley and Hitch rugby players to remember the names of teams they had played that season week by week accurate recall was not affected by how long ago the match was but the number of games they had played in the meantime - Opposite to decay theory and is better explained by interference theory the players who had played more games would forget proportionately more because of more interference -showing interference explanation can apply to at least some every day situations.
What is another limitation of the theory of interference?
It appears to be only a temporary effect, not a long-term one with the use of queues - Tulving and Psotka gave participant one list of words at a time and were unaware they had been organised into categories recall averaged around 70% off the first list and became worse with each one at the end of the procedure. Participants were asked to recall but with the names of the categories and recall rose to 70% again - supporting the concept that information is not lost from the LTM, but there are accessibility problems at times – so whilst interference is a problem it can be overcome by using retrieval cues.
