list of words have no personalmeaning 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
ceraso1967 found if memory was tested again after 24 hrs recognition of words showed considerable spontaneousrecovery
? 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 & hitch1977 asked rugby players to nameteams had played during season weekly
most players missed some games so lastteam that some had played had been 2/3weeks 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 nomatches had been played since then compared to being asked 1 week later but with3matches played
demonstrates retroactiveinterference acts as explanation as to why we forget info in everydaysituations
* thousands of lab experiments for this theory?
labexperiments allow researcher to controlevs that could affect results
e.g was conducted in controlledenvironment 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 newinfo & how much info we forget
X evidence to suggest individual differences influence interference?
kane & engle 2000 demonstrated individuals with a greatingwm span were less susceptible to proactive interference
p were given 3word lists to learn & those with low wm span showed greaterproactive interference when recalling 2nd & 3rd list
demonstrates that there may be other factors that influence whether or not we forget things such as workingmemory