Inference

• When does interference occur?


  occurs when two sets of information become confused in memory so competition in retrieval of old and new knowledge.
• Proactive interference 


  information stored previously interferes with an attempt to recall something new. e.g. old phone number disrupts you from recall f new phone number.
• Retroactive interference 


  new information prevents the recall of information previously stored. e.g. new car registration prevent you from recalling old car registration.
• Research investigation proactive interference - Underwood


  Procedure- when PP learnt a list of words and were tested after 24h, reacall accuracy was 70% but if pp learned 10 or more lists and tested after 24h then recall decreased by 20%. Findings suggests the more lists the PP had to learn the worse the retrieval was as the older information learned so more difficult to recall than newer.
• Research support for retroactive interference - Muller 


  He gave PP nonsense syllables to learn and after an interval, they were asked to recall them. If PP were given a task to do in the interval the recall declined as recent information interfered and prevented retrieval of older learning.
• Evaluation of interference - Rugby study by Baddeley and Hitch


  Rugby players were asked to recall names of the teams they had played against in this season. Some players had played in all games and some didn't. If decay was an explanation of forgetting then all players are expected to forget a similar amount of teams. However, the more games that they played the worse the retrieval of teams was and the less games played the better the retrieval of teams was. Shows time is not a factor but could be the amount of pre existing information in memory.
• Evaluation of interference

  -Interference is not a true explanation for forgetting: the effects are temporary and the information does not disappear from LTM but is just confused with existing information in LTM.

  +Real world applications: interference is greater when two sets of material are similar and are both learned within a short period of time. Its used by advertisers who run them multiple times across one day which is better than running adverts over multiple days and increases chance of forgetting.