forgetting

• the multi-store model of memory states that LTM has an unlimited capacity and memories have a duration of potentially a lifetime

  however we know by experience that we forget info stored in LTM

  but does that mean that memories are gone (availability) or we just cant reach them (accessibility)
• interference

  one memory disturbs the ability to recall another
• proactive interference

  previously learnt information interferes with the new information you are trying to store
• retroactive interference


  a new memory interferes with older ones
• proactive interference

  pro = forward

  retroactive interference

  retro = backwards
• by McGeoch and Mcdonald in 1931

  evidence shown that the more similar the interference is to the words being remembered, the worst recall is

  in this case, the words on the word had a similar meaning to the second round of words. therefore we would expect the similarity to interfere with our recall of the words = worse recall
• underwood and postman

  proactive interference could be equally significant. concluded that when participants have to learn a list of words, they do not learn the list of words encountered later on in the sequence as well as lists of words encountered earlier on

  overall if participants memorised 10 or more lists, after 24 hours, 20% would be remembered. if only learned one list, recall was over 70%
• baddeley and hitch


  investigated interference effects in an everyday setting of rugby players recalling names of teams they played against. some players played in all games, other missed some games because of injury. time interval throughout rugby season was same for all players but number of intervening games was different for each players because of missed games

  if interference theory is correct then those players who played most games should forget proportionally more because of interference - which is what baddeley and hitch found, demonstrating effect of interference in everyday life
• McGeoch and Mcdonald


  experimented with the effects of similarity of materials. gave participants a list of 10 adjectives (list a). once these were learned there was then a resting interval of 10 minutes during which they learned list b followed by recall

  if list b was a list of synonyms of list a, recall was poor 12%; in list b was nonsense syllabus, this had less effect (26% recall); if list b was numbers this had the least effect (37% recall). this shows that interference is strongest the more similar the items are. only interference, rather than decay, can explain such effects
• 'encoding specificity principle' (tulving) = ''the greater the similarity between the coding event and the retrieval event, the greater the likelihood of realising the original memory''
• some cues are linked to a material in a meaningful way - a meaningful link or connection to help you remember it

  eg, mneumonics: tools to help remember facts or large amount of information. it can be a song, rhyme, acronym, image or a phrase to help remember a list of facts in a certain order.
• two types of cue dependent forgetting


  1. context = external environmental cues
  2. state = internal cues