Interference theory:

• 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