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Psychology - Interference theory - AO1 Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

Memory - Interference theory - AO1

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

Interf­erence theory

interf­erence theory is made of proactive and retroa­ctive interf­erence. Interf­erence is when two pieces of inform­ation conflict with each other resulting in forgetting or distortion of memories.

Retroa­ctive interf­erence

Retroa­ctive interf­erence - when a new memory interferes with an old one. Eg. A teacher has too many new students that their names are confli­cting with the old students names from last year.

Retroa­ctive interf­erence research

POSTMAN
Aim- to invest­igate how retroa­ctive interf­erence affects long term memory
procedure - partic­ipants were split into two groups.
both groups had to remember a list of paired words
- Eg. Cat - Tree, jelly - moss, book - tractor.
the experi­mental group also has P.D. to learn another list of words where the second word on each pair is different. Eg. Cat - glass, jelly - time, book - revolver.
The control group were not given teh sound list
All partic­ipants were asked to recall the words on the first list.
Findings - the recall of the control group was more accurate than that of the experi­mental group.
Conclusion - the suggests that the learning items on the second list interfered with the pts Ability to recall the list. This is retroa­ctive interf­erence.
 

Proactive interf­erence

Proactive interf­erence - when an old memory interferes with a new one. Eg. A teacher who had so many students last year that their names are confli­cting with the new students names.

Proactive interf­erence research

UNDERWOOD
Aim - to examine the effect of proactive interf­erence on long term memory.
procedure - conducted a meta-a­nalysis
Findings - he found that most studies showed that when pts had to learn a series of word lists they do not learn the lists of words encoun­tered later on in the sequence as well as the lists of words encoun­tered earlier on. Also if pts learned 10 or more lists the 24 hours later they remembered about 20% of what they learnt but if they learnt one list they remembered about 70%.
Conclusion - proactive interf­erence has taken place as each word list makes it harder to learn subsequent lists.