Reasons for forgetting Flashcards
Reasons for forgetting
Interference, retrieval failure
Definition of interference
One memory disturbs the ability to recall another. This might result in forgetting or distorting one or the other or both. This is more likely to happen if the memories are similar
Different types of interference
Proactive interference
Retroactive interference
Proactive interference
Previously learnt new information interferes with the new information you are trying to store, e.g. you are struggling to remember the names of students in your psychology class instead you are remembering the names of the students in your maths group last year
Retroactive interference
A new memory interferes with older ones e.g. you have difficulties remembering the names of the students in your maths group last year because you learnt the names of your psychology class this year
Research support into the effects of similarity
McGeoch and McDonald (1931)
McGeoch and McDonald
-Studied RI by changing the amount of similarity between two sets to material (lists of words)
-Participants each had a list of the same 10 words to recall until they were 100% accurate
-They were then given a new list to learn
-Once they had learnt the new list they were then required to recall the original list
-6 groups used, each given a new list to remember:
Group 1 - words had same meanings as the originals
Group 2 - words had opposite meanings to the originals
Group 3 - words unrelated to the original ones
Group 4 - nonsense syllables
Group 5 - three-digit numbers
Group 6 - no new list
McGeoch and McDonald results
-Performance depended on nature of the second list
-The most similar material produced the worst recall
-When the participants were given very different material (e.g. three digit numbers) the mean number of items recalled increased
Further research support for different types of interference
Baddeley and Hitch (1977)
Baddeley and Hitch
Asked rugby players to recall the names of teams they had played so far in that season week by week
The number of intervening games varied as some players had missed games due to injury
Accurate recall did not depend on how long ago the match took place. More important was the number of games played in the meantime
Players who played the most games (most interference for memory) had the poorest recall
Validity of the theory is increased
Counterpoint to research
Interference may cause some forgetting in ‘real life’, unusual because the conditions necessary are relatively rare
Two memories similar to order to interfere with each other
This doesn’t happen often which suggests most forgetting may be better explained by other theories retrieval failure due to lack of cues)
Research into retroactive interference
Schmidt et al (2000)
Schmidt et al (2000)
Aim: To assess the influence of retroactive interference upon the memory of street names learned during childhood
Procedure: 700 names randomly selected from a database of 1700 former students at a German elementary school
-Sent out a questionnaire to complete, respondents were 11 to 79 years old
-Given map of Molenberg neighbourhood (where they had gone to school), asked to remember as many street names as possible
-Personal details collected - how many times they had moved house, where they had lived and for how long, how often they had visited Molenburg
-The amount of retroactive interference experienced was assessed by the amount of times the individual had moved to another neighbourhood or city (thus learning new sets of street names)
Schmidt et al (2000) - findings and conclusion
Findings: There was a positive association between the number of times participants had moved house outside the Molenberg neighbourhood and the number of street names they had forgotten
Conclusion: The findings suggested that learning new patterns of street names when moving house makes remembering old patterns of street names harder to do.
Retroactive interference does seem able to explain forgetting in some real-life situations
Counterpoint to interference
That it is temporary and can be overcome with cues
Tulving and Psotka (1971)
Gave participants lists of words organised into categories, one list at a time (they didn’t know what the categories were)
Recall average was 70% for the first list
This became progressively worse as more lists were learnt (PI)
At the end of the procedure the participants were given a cued recall test - they were told the names of the categories
Recall then rose again to about 70%
This shows that interference causes as temporary loss of accessibility to material that is still in the LTM - this was a finding not predicted by the interference theory
Support for interference from drug studies
Retrograde facilitation: Coenen and van Luijtelaar (1997):
-Gave participants lists of words and later asked them to recall them
-The intervening experience in between would act as interference
-Those under the influence of diazepam - recall one week later was poor (compared with a placebo control group)
-But when the list was learnt before the drug was taken, later recall was better than the placebo group
So the drug actually improved (facilitated) recall material learned beforehand
John Wixted (2004) suggests that the drug prevents new information recaching parts of the brain involved in processing memories
Therefore it cannot interfere retroactively with information already stored
Real-life applications
Danaher et al (2008) found that recall and recognition of an advertiser’s message were impaired when participants were exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week
This is a serious problem when so much money is spent on advertising
Danaher et al suggest an application of this research is that such effects can be overcome by running the advert multiple times on one day to reduce interference effects
Retrieval failure definition
‘A form of forgetting. It occurs when we don’t have the necessary cues to access memory. The memory is available but not accessible unless a suitable cue is provided’
Cues definiton
‘A trigger of information that allows us to access a memory. Such cues may be meaningful or may be indirectly linked by being encoded at the time of learning. Indirect cues may be external (environment context) or internal (mood or degree of drunkenness)
Evidence for retrieval failure
- Endal Tulving (1983) reviewed research into retrieval failure and discovered a conistsent pattern to the findings
- He called his pattern the encoding specificity principle (ESP)
- This states that if a cue is going to be a helpful it has to be both:
1. Present at encoding (when we learnt the material)
2. Present at retrieval (when we are recalling it)
If the cues are available at encoding and retrieval are different then there will be some forgetting
Meaningful cues
Some cues are encoded at the time of learning in a meaningful way
E.g by saying STM you are then able to recall lots of different information about short term memory
These cues are used in Mnemonics - tools to help remember facts or a large amount of information
It can be a song, rhyme, acronym, image, or a phrase to help remember a lists of facts in a certain order
Two types of cue-dependent forgetting
- Context - external environmental cues (e.g. weather or a place)
- State - internal cues (e.g. feeling upset, being drunk)
Research support for context dependent
Godden and Baddeley (1975)
Had deep sea divers learn 40 unrelated words either on the beach, or using scuba equipment, under 15 feet of water. Half the divers were then asked to switch locations before they all tried to recall the words
Results:
Beach and Beach - 13.5
Beach and underwater - 8.6
Underwater and underwater = 11.4
Underwater and beach - 8.4
Accurate recall was 40% lower in non -matching conditions
Conclusion - the external cues available at learning were different from the ones available at recall and this led to retrieval failure
Support for state-dependent forgetting
Carter and Cassidy (1998)
Procedure:
Gave antihistamine drugs to their participants. They had a mild sedative effect making the participants slightly drowsy. This creates an internal psychological state different from the ‘normal’ state of being awake and alert.
The participants had lists of words and passages to remember and then recall again. There were four conditions:
Learn on drug - recall when on drug
Learn on drug - recall not on drug
Learn not on drug - recall when on drug
Learn not on drug - recall when not on drug
Findings:
In the conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall, performance on the memory test was significantly worse
So when cues are absent, e.g. drowsy when recalling information you were alert at learning, there is more forgetting
Real world application for cues
- Retrieval cues can help some forgetting in everyday situations
-Although cues don’t have a very strong effect on forgetting, Baddeley suggest they are still worth paying attention too
-E.G. forgetting what you went into a room for, when you return to the original room, you remember
Research support for retrieval failurwb
-There is lots of research to support the retrieval failure explanation
-Eysenck and Keane (2010) argue that retrieval failure is perhaps the main reason for forgetting from LTM
Counterpoint to retrieval failure
Baddeley (1997) argues that context effects are actually not very strong, espescially in real life. This is because the different context’s have to be very different before the effect is seen. E.g. land and sea. Learning something in one room and then recalling it in another is not going to result in too much forgetting
This means that retrieval failure due to lack of cues may not actually explain much everyday forgetting
Limitation to retrieval failure
-One limitation is that context effects may depend substantially on the type of memory being tested
-Godden and Baddeley (1980) replicated underwater experiment but used a recognition test instead of recall
-Participants had to say whether they recognised a word read to them from the list, instead of retrieving it for themselves
-When recognition was tested, there was no context-dependent effect - performance was the same in all four conditions (water/land, water/water etc)
-This suggests that retrieval failure is a limited explanation for forgetting because it only applies when a person has to recall information rather than recognise it
