A03 - Memory - Forgetting - Interference Flashcards
Methodological issues: A limitation of interfere to explain forgetting is that the results lack ecological validity.
This is due to most of the research for retroactive and proactive interference being conducted in a lab setting.
Similar to McGeoch and McDonald, many studies in memory make the participants learn a meaningless list of words.
The participants need to learn and recall these words within a short time frame, such as 20 minutes.
This allows for a greater chance that interference will be demonstrated because it’s far from real life accounts of memory, e.g remembering personally specific dates.
Learning lists of words lacks mundane realism, therefore the results might be different to how memory works in real life, e.g remembering a friend’s birthday.
Therefore, the results from lab studies should be generalised with caution as the task’s artificial setting needs to be considered when applying the findings to real life.
Real world findings: A strength of the interference theory is that the findings is reliable.
In order to combat the criticism of the lack of ecological validity within lab studies, research has been carried out in the real world and they show the same results.
Baddeley and Hitch (1977) asked rugby players to recall the names of teams they had played over the season.
Some of the players had missed games, so the last game they played might have differed in time.
The recall accuracy wasn’t affected by how long ago the match was but the number of games that they played in the meantime.
This opposes the decay theory and is better explained by interference theory.
The players who played more games would forget proportionally more due to more interference.
This shows that interference can apply to some everyday scenarios.
Individual differences: A limitation of the interference theory is that it doesn’t consider individual differences.
Kane and Engle (2000) demonstrated that individuals were less susceptible to interference when they had a greater WM span.
They gave participants three word lists to learn.
The participants with a lower working memory span showed larger proactive interference when recalling the second and third list than those with a higher working memory span.
This could suggest that people are equally affected by proactive interference and the effects of it are dependent upon the individual.
This means that when generalising the interference theory in forgetting, it needs to be done within the individual’s context.
Temporary effect: A limitation of the interference theory is that it seems to only be a temporary effect and not long term.
Tulving and Psotka (1971) gave participants one list of words at a time and then were unaware that they’d been sorted into categories.
For the first list, recall averaged around 70% but then became worse as the list went on.
At the end of the study, the participants were asked to recall but with names of the categories and the recall rose to 70% again.
This supports the idea that information isn’t lost from long term memory but there are just accessibility problems sometimes.
To conclude, when there’s a problem it can be overcome by using retrieval cues.
