Interference AO3

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  +One strength comes from evidence of retrograde facilitation. Coenen and Luijtelaar gave participants a list of words and later asked them to recall the list, assuming that the intervening experiences would act as interference. They found that when a list of words was learned under the influence of the drug diazepam, recall one week later was poor compared to the placebo control group. But when the list was learned before the drug was taken, later recall was better than the control group's. Therefore the drug facilitated (improved) recall of material learned beforehand.
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  + Wixted suggests that the drug prevents new information (experienced after taking the drug) reaching parts of the brain involved in processing memories, so it can’t interfere retroactively with information already stored. This shows that if you reduce the interference, you reduce the forgetting.
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  -One limitation is that interference is temporary and can be overcome by using cues. Tulving & Psotka gave participants lists of words organised into categories one list at a time (participants weren't told what the categories were). For the first list recall averaged at 70% but became progressively worse as participants learned each additional list (proactive interference.)
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  -At the end of the procedure, participants were given a cued recall test - they were told the names of the categories. Recall rose to 70%. This shows interference causes a temporary loss of accessibility to material still in LTM - the finding isn't predicted by interference theory.
• +One strength; evidence of interference effects in everyday situations. Baddeley & Hitch asked rugby players to recall the names of the teams they played against during a rugby season. They all played for the same time interval but the number of intervening games varied; some players missed matches due to injury. Players who played the most games had the poorest recall. This study increases the theory's validity.
• +-Interference may cause some forgetting in everyday life situations but it’s unusual; the conditions needed for interference are rare. The situation can't be manipulated into life in a lab study. This suggests that most forgetting may be better explained by other theories such as retrieval failure due to a lack of cues.