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Proactive Interference and Retroactive interference Summary

Main article: Interference Theory''

Context

The concepts of proactive interference and retroactive interference were first introduced by the studies of verbal behavior, focusing on the use of paired-associate learning, in which a stimulus is paired with an idea or object that elicits a response. In order to observe interference using paired-associate stimuli, the target association should be similar, to some extent, to the interfering association, otherwise interference would not occur. For example, if subjects are asked to memorize word pairs (e.g., donkey-tree and dog-tree), interference will occur when two pairs share a common associate (in this example, tree). A study using paired-associate tasks by Wickens, Born, and Allen (1963) showed that if target material and interfering material decrease in similarity, a decrease in proactive interference will follow.

Proactive interference is the interfering of older memories with the retrieval of newer memories. Compared with retroactive interference, it is less common and less problematic. Proactive interference is likely to happen when memories are learned in similar contexts. An example is when motor abilities from skills that were previously learned interfere with new abilities in another skill being learned. . If an individual learned how to ski in the 70s, when they had straight skis, and he or she hasn’t skied for years, they would have to relearn how to ski with the more modern rounded downhill skills. Proactive interference is also associated with poorer list discrimination, which occurs when participants are asked to judge whether an item has appeared on a previously learned list. If the items or pairs to be learned are conceptually related to one another, then proactive interference has a greater effect. Delos Wickens discovered that proactive interference build-up is released when there is a change to the category of items being learned, leading to increased processing in working memory. Presenting new skills later in practice can considerably reduce proactive interference, which is desirable for participants to have the best opportunity to encode fresh new memories into long-term memory."

Retroactive interference is the interference of newer memories with the retrieval of older memories. The learning of new memories contributes to the forgetting of previously learned memories. For example, if you learn Spanish and then Italian, the acquisition of Italian should make it more difficult to retrieve your Spanish vocabulary. The term Retroactive Interference was first brought up by Muller and colleagues; they demonstrated that if the retention interval (the amount of time between stimulus presentation and recall) was filled with tasks and material, interference would be caused with the previously learned items. Retroactive interference may have larger effects than proactive interference because it not only involves competition between previously learned material and new material, but it also involves unlearning. .

Paired-associate learning

One strategy used to understand how people encode and retrieve memory associations is called paired-associate learning. In a typical study using paired-associate learning, subjects would be presented with pairs of unrelated words (cat, phone) and then memory for those word pairs would be tested. Results from Rohwer’s (1966) studies on paired-associate learning indicate that subjects have increased recall ability when words are associated with a specific context than without such context. For example, subjects would perform better in a recalling task if the sentence “The COW chased the BALL” than if they simply tried to remember the words cow and ball. , which seems to support the claim that elaborative rehearsal can improve memory. Other research by Bobrow and Bower (1969) indicated that subject-generated sentences were better recalled than experimenter-generated sentences, suggesting that self-generated sentences improved word pair recall. Bower (1969) also suggested that if experimenters try to control subject’s spontaneous elaboration in the control group by telling them to repeat the words over and over (without making any elaborative rehearsal), recall would be negatively affected.