Interference theory:

Cards (3)

  • STRENGTH:
    • support for more everyday situations
    • Baddeley and Hitch 1977 asked rugby players to recall the names of the players they played against during the season
    • They all had equal time playing rugby however the number of intervening games played varied due to injuries and people not playing
    • They found that those who played the most number of games had a poorer recall
    • This shows evidence for interference in some real world application increasing the external validity of the theory
  • LIMITATION:
    • However, though some interference may occur in some everyday situations its too unusual
    • Unlike lab studies, the nature of the controlling environment means that researchers are able to create an ideal condition for interference to occur
    • As established, for interference to occur two memories have to be similar which is unlikely in everyday life unless your revising etc
    • This means that forgetting may be better explained using another theory such as a lack of cues than interference
  • LIMITATION:
    • Temparory and could be overcome using cues
    • Tulving and Psotka 1971 gave pp a list of words organised into three categories in which they did not know.
    • The recall of words for the first list averaged of to 70%
    • This decreased as they learned an additional list
    • At the end of the study they were given the category for the list and it rose to 70% again
    • Suggests that it causes a temporary loss of accessibility to material that is still in the LTM, a finding not predicted by interference theory