Cards (5)

  • 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