support for interference theory

• underwood 1957
• looked at past studies into pps recall of word lists
• underwood investigated how well pps who had been asked to learn multiple word lists recalled the list they had learned
• he compared this to the recall of pps who had just been asked to learn one word list
• underwood found that if pp were only asked to learn 1 word list their recall was around 80% accurate
• but if pps had to learn multiple word lists their recall of the last word list was only 20% accurate
• he concluded we forget due to proactive interference
• this supports the idea that interference is caused by similar items competing with each other when we try to remember them