A03 IF

• X artificial stimuli?

  • list of words have no personal meaning to participants in everyday life
  • we try to remember a much wider variety of complex things
  • ? ecological
  • it is difficult to generalise findings to explanations of forgetting in real world
• X may not cause a memory to be forgotten?

  • effects of interference may be temporary
  • ceraso 1967 found if memory was tested again after 24 hrs recognition of words showed considerable spontaneous recovery
  • ? internal
  • shows interference may only occur because memories are temporarily not accessible rather than having actually been lost & become unavailable
  • suggests may be more complex reasons for why we forget info long term rather than being interfered with
• * evidence to support?

  • baddley & hitch 1977 asked rugby players to name teams had played during season weekly
  • most players missed some games so last team that some had played had been 2/3 weeks ago
  • results showed recall did not depend on how long ago team had played but number of games person had played
  • players recall of team from 3 weeks ago was better if no matches had been played since then compared to being asked 1 week later but with 3 matches played
  • demonstrates retroactive interference acts as explanation as to why we forget info in everyday situations
• * thousands of lab experiments for this theory?

  • lab experiments allow researcher to control evs that could affect results
  • e.g was conducted in controlled environment where factors such as time of day are controlled - participant/situation variables
  • * internal
  • controlled nature of research methods involved allow us to establish cause & effect relationship between introduction of new info & how much info we forget
• X evidence to suggest individual differences influence interference?

  • kane & engle 2000 demonstrated individuals with a greating wm span were less susceptible to proactive interference
  • p were given 3 word lists to learn & those with low wm span showed greater proactive interference when recalling 2nd & 3rd list
  • demonstrates that there may be other factors that influence whether or not we forget things such as working memory