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Memory - Coggle Diagram
Memory
Interference
Proactive Interference
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Study
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Overall, Underwood found that, if participants memorised 10/+ lists, after 24 hours, they would only remember 20% of what they learned.
If they learned one list, recall was over 70%.
Retroactive Interference
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Study
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They gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes and, after a retention interval, asked participants to recall the lists.
Performance was less good if participants had been given an intervening task between initial learning and recall.
Some participants were shown three landscape paintings and ask to describe them and then recall while some participants were simply asked to recall.
The intervening task produced retroactive interference effects because the later task (describing pictures) interfered with what had been previously learnt.
Evaluation
Real-world application
Interference can be applicable to a real-world scenario - advertising.
Danaher et al. found that both recall and recognition of an advertiser’s message were impaired when participants were exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week.
Interference only explains some situations of forgetting
Interference doesn’t explain every situation of forgetting. Special conditions are required for interference to lead to forgetting as the two memories need to be similar.
Individual differences
A greater working memory span were less susceptible to proactive interference. Researchers tested this by giving participants three word lists to learn. The participants wiyh low working memory spans showed greater proactive interference.
Retrieval Failure
When information is available in long-term memory but cannot be recalled because of the absence of cues.
When a new memory is made, we also store information about the situation, and these are known as retrieval cues.
Types of cues
State Retrieval Cues
Bodily cues (e.g. physical, emotional, mood, being drunk.)
States that memory will be best when a person's physical or psychological state is similar at encoding and retrieval.
For example, if you are learning while drunk, then you will be more likely to recall that information when you are back in that drunken state.
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Context Retrieval Cues
External cues in the environment (e.g. smell, locations)
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According to this explanation, forgetting occurs when information is available in LTM but not accessible.
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Study
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Asked deep=sea divers to memorise a list of words. One group did this on a beach and the other underwater.
When they asked to recall the words, half of the beach learners recalled underwater while the rest remained on the beach.
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The results show that those who had recalled in their same environment, they recalled 40% more words than those who recalled in a different environment.
This suggests that the retrieval of information is improved if it occurs in the context in which it was learned.