forgetting

• what are the 2 forms of forgetting in LTM?

  • interference forgetting
  • retrieval failure
• what is interference forgetting?

  interference has been proposed mainly as an explanation of forgetting in LTM. interference theory of forgetting says that memories become 'mixed up' and confused with other memories.
• what are the 2 types of interference forgetting?

  • proactive interference
  • retroactive interference
• what is proactive interference?

  where old information interferes with new information, causing forgetting of the new information
• give 2 examples of proactive interference

  • remembering your old student number causing the forgetting of new candidate number
  • remembering old phone number causing the forgetting of the new phone number
• what is retroactive interference?

  where new information interferes with old information causing the forgetting of the old information
• give 2 examples of retroactive interference

  • remembering the new student number, causing the forgetting of the old student number
  • remembering the new phone number, causing the forgetting of the old phone number
• describe Baddeley's rugby player study (method, results, conclusion)

  Rugby players were asked to recall names of teams they had played earlier in the year. one group of players had played in all games, another group were injured in some of the middle games. all were asked to recall the names of the teams they had played.

  the results showed that the players who were injured for part of the season and has missed some games, could remember more compared to thise players who had played throughout the whole of the season.

  this shows that how long ago games were played was not relavant, the number of games played was found to be impacting on memory and causing interference and therefore resulting in forgetting.
• what is retrieval failure?

  this is an explanation of forgetting in LTM. the theory says that we forget because we cannot retrieve information from LTM as we do not have the appropriate context or cues.
• what is encoding specificity principle (ESP)?

  the idea that cues help retrieval if the same ones are present at both encoding and retrieval
• who came up with ESP?

  Endel Tulving (1983)
• what is a cue?

  something that can provide a trigger to memory recall and so makes forgetting less likely.
• what are 2 types of cues?

  context (external) and state (internal)
• give 2/3 examples of context cues

  • sitting in a silent room
  • sitting in a specific room
  • the weather
• give 2/3 examples of state cues

  sitting in silence

  drunkness/intoxication

  mood

  sleepy
• describe Godden and Baddeley's deep sea diver study (method, results, conclusion)

  deep sea divers learned a list of words either underwater or on land and then were asked to recall the words either underwater or on land. there were 4 conditions.

  1. learn on land, recall on land
  2. learn on land, recall underwater
  3. learn underwater, recall on land
  4. learn underwater, recall underwater

  in 2 of these conditions the environmental conditions, the contexts of learning and recall matched, whereas in the other 2 they did not. accurate recall was 40% lower in the non-matching conditions. the external cues available at the time of learning were different from the ones at recall and this led to retrieval failure.

  this suggests that contextual forgetting is occurring because recall was poor when there was a lack of context dependent cues available to aid memory. (being in a different environment to encoding)