McGeoch & McDonald

• McGeoch and McDonald studied the effects of similarity on interference. - They changed the similarity between 2 word lists

  • participants learned 10 words until they had 100% accuracy, then learnt a new list
  • examples of the lists were synonyms, antonyms and unrelated words
  • synonyms had the worst recall, showing that if 2 items are very similar to each other, interference is greater, leading to a greater likelihood of forgetting