"In order to prevent forgetting, it is important to consider why it occurs".

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“In order to prevent forgetting, it is important to consider why it occurs”

The concept of forgetting suggests that something has disappeared from memory – it is not available. Or it could that memory is simply mislaid – it is not accessible.

             Availability                        Accessibility

 

         Concerns STM                    Concerns STM

              and LTM                          only

Interference Theory

It is assumed that one set of learning in some way interferes with another set and wipes out the memory. Proactive interference is when previous learning interferes with later learning (Past experience interferes with current recall). Retroactive interference is when later learning disrupts memory for earlier learning. (Successive experience interferes with recall of material learned earlier). A study that proves this is the Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924) study. They asked two students to recall nonsense syllables at intervals between one and eight hours.  The students were either awake or asleep during the withholding interval. If the theory was correct we would expect the same amount of forgetting whether they were asleep or awake. The fact that they forgot more when they were awake suggests that the interference from other activities was responsible for the increased forgetting, rather than decay. 

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Criticisms

It is unlikely that interference theory has much applicability to everyday life. It is rare that two different responses are attached to the same stimulus and therefore much of our forgetting is unlikely to be due to interference. There experiment was flawed because there was no control over what was happening when the participants were awake or asleep.   Also there were other differences between the two conditions. In the asleep condition, the students learned the material in the evening, whereas their learning usually occurred in the morning in the awake condition.

Trace Decay Theory

Forgetting might also ...

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