M : Interference - explanation of forgetting Flashcards
(14 cards)
What is interference?
When is it most likely to occur?
- An explanation of forgetting in terms of one memory disrupting the ability to recall another.
- This is most likely to occur when two memories have some similarity.
What is proactive interference?
Past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something.
What is retroactive interference?
Current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning.
Who first identified retroactive interference effects?
Georg Muller and his student.
Retroactive Interference
What did George Muller give his participants and what were they asked to do?
- Gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes.
- After a retention interval they asked participants to recall the lists.
Retroactive interference- Georg Muller
What were the findings?
How did the intervening task produce the RI?
- Performance was less good if participants had been given an intervening task between initial learning and recall (they were shown three landscape paintings and asked to recall them.)
- The later task (describing the pictures) interferred with what had previously been learned.
Who studied proactive interference?
Benton Underwood
What did Benton Underwood analyse and conclude for Proactive interference?
He analysed the findings from a number of studies and concluded that when participants have to learn a series of word lists-
they do not learn the lists of words encountered later on in the sequence - as well as lists of words encountered earlier on.
Proactive Interference- Benton Underwood.
- What did Underwood find for participants that memorised 10 or more lists?
- What is they only learnt one list recall?
- 10 or more lists- after 24 hours, they remembered about 20% of what they had learnt.
- 1 list- Recall was over 70%
Similarity of test materials
In an earlier study, what did McGeoch and McDonald experiment and do?
The experimented with the effects of similarity of materials.
- They gave participants a list of 10 adjectives (list A).
- Once these were learned, there was a resting interval of 10 minutes during which they learned List B, followed by recall.
Similarity of test materials.
What were the findings of the study by McGeoch and McDonald (1931)?
What did the findings overall show?
- If list B was a list of synonyms of list A, recall was poor (12%).
- If List B was nonsense syllabus, this had less effect (26% recall).
- If list B had numbers, this had the least effect (37% recall).
This shows that interference is strongest the more similar the items are. Only interference, rather then decay, can explain such effects.
A real-world study
What did Baddeley and Hitch (1977) investigate?
What was the same for all players and what was different and why?
- They investigated interference effects in an everyday setting of rugby players recalling the names of the teams they had played against over a rugby season.
- Some players played all the games in the season- others missed games because of injury.
- The time interval from start to the end of the season was the same for all the players but the number of intervening games was different for each player because of missed games.
A real-world study- Baddeley and Hitch study
- What should happen if decay theory is correct?
- What should happen if interference theory is correct?
- Decay theory- All players should recall a similar percentage of the games played because time alone should cause forgetting.
- Interference Theory- Those players who played most games should forget proportionately more because of interference- which is what Baddeley and Hitch found, demonstrating the effect of interference in everyday life.
What are the evaluation/ discussion points?
- Research is quite artificial.
- Interference only explains some situations of forgetting.
- Accessibility versus availability.
- Real-world application to advertising.
- Individual differences.
