Describe and evaluate interference as an explanation for ...



Describe and evaluate interference as an explanation for forgetting.

[12 marks]

Interference is where two lots of information become confused in memory. This occurs in the LTM and is more likely to happen when the two pieces of information that are becoming confused are more similar. An example of this would be telephone numbers or learning two languages at the same time. There are two different types of interference. Proactive is where old learning affects the recall of new information and an example of this would be if you changed your telephone number but kept recalling your old number. Retroactive interference is when newer information affects your ability to recall old information, so the new information learnt overwrites the earlier learned information. An example of this would be if you are studying sociology in the morning and then psychology in the afternoon and when you try and recall what you have learned in sociology you recall what you learned in psychology instead.

It can be hard to identify whether interference is the true cause of forgetting in everyday life, this is particularly true of retrospective interference as this could be just because of the passage of time (decay). One study that helps distinguish between the two was carried out by Baddeley who studied a real life situation in rugby players. Over a season, some players had played in all the games and some had missed games because of injury. The players were asked to recall the names of the teams they had played against over a season and found that, as a proportion of the number of games played, the group who had missed games had recalled more. This supports interference theory as the passage of time was the same in both groups.

This a real life study so has good ecological validity and therefore improves the validity of interference as an explanation of forgetting in the LTM.

A further study was more controlled and this was carried out by Underwood in a laboratory experiment. The researchers gave participants either one list or word pairs (e.g. tree-cat, book tractor) or two lists of word pairs using the same first word. The participants were then asked to recall the first list. Underwood found that the group who were given two word lists were less accurate and showed signs of interference from the second list and the group only given one word pair list were more accurate.

This provides clear evidence for the role of retroactive interference but as it is a lab study, using artificial stimuli it can be argued that it lacks ecological validity and so may not reflect how forgetting occurs in real life.

It can be argued that interference does not actually cause permanent forgetting and is only temporary, the information is stored in the brain but has been temporarily disrupted. Therefore, it is not a true explanation of forgetting.

Finally this explanation of forgetting can provide important practical applications for people in everyday life. When we are trying to learn similar pieces of information it might be useful to do this on different days so we can clearly distinguish between them. This may be particularly useful for students.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download