How interference affects memory recall

Introduction

Background research

Some study’s that are similar to the experiment are the Baddeley and hitch (1997),

McGeoch and McDonald (1931) and Peterson and Peterson (1959).

The Baddeley and Hicth study was a study about rugby players forgetting the names of the teams they had played and that it depended more on the number of teams they had played rather than the amount of time and so the interference of all the different teams they had played had caused them to forget.

McGeoch and McDonalds study showed interference of using different lists of words to remember and to recall. The participants had to learn various list of words with various types of list to learn for ten minutes afterwards. Recall of the original words was then tested and the participants that were given a second list of words with similar meaning to the first recalled less than those given unrelated words or nonsense syllables, the participants given no second list of words to recall had the best memory recall.

The third study that is similar to the experiment is the Peterson and Peterson (1959)

In this study participants were asked remember a single nonsense trigram then had an interpolated task to stop them from rehearsing the trigram such as counting backwards in three’s from one hundred. The average recall of the trigram was 80% after 3 seconds but dropped to 10% after 18 seconds. This is because the counting task interfered with rehearsing the trigram and caused forgetting.

Rationale

The study that is most similar to the this study is the Peterson and Peterson study it is similar to mine as we are both testing memory recall and how memory recall is affected by retroactive interference. Peterson and Peterson used interference of counting backwards in threes but in this experiment music will be acting as interference after learning the list of words. Another difference between the studies are that Peterson and Peterson asked participants to remember single nonsense trigrams where as in this experiment participants will be asked to learn a list of words. The outcome I am expecting is that participants who have listened to music after learning the list of words will remember less than participants who haven’t listened to music.

Aim

To find out whether interference of listening to music between learning and recall can affect recall of a list of words.

Hypothesis

Experimental – The participants who have had interference of listening to music will recall fewer words from the list than participants who had no interference of music.

Null – Whether people have listened to music after learning the words or not will not affect the number of words recalled.

Method

Method and Design

The study is a laboratory experiment I used this because I could control all the extraneous variables such as the word list, amount of time participants have to study word list and the time they have to recall wordlist and the amount of time they have to listen to the music. Another advantage is that a laboratory experiment ha ecological validity as my participants were in there natural setting it helps me to study them in there natural state.

Design

This experiment used independent measures such as different participants per test rather than using the same participants for non interference and interference otherwise the participants would see wordlist twice and so would have a better chance of memory recall of wordlist.

Variables

My IV is whether participants listen to music for 1min 30 seconds after they have learnt the list of words or whether they recall the words straight away.

My DV is the number of words recalled.

Participants and Sampling

My target population is students age 16 to 17 years old. I ...