The associative theory of interference: studying forgetting

In this article we are going to know why we forget certain concepts or memories according to Jenkins and Dallenbach's associative theory of interference.

This theory arises at a time when the phenomena of forgetting are beginning to be studied, that is, it is a theory of forgetting and human memory.

Have you ever had a lot of things explained to you in one day, and at the end of it, you no longer remembered any of them? Or had you just mixed up the stories? We are going to know in detail why this happens.

• Related article: "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

Ebbinghaus's Curve of Forgetting

The first researcher who studied forgetting as a psychological process in memory paradigms was the German Hermann Ebbinghaus, who did his work on forgetting and learning nonsense syllables.

Ebbinghaus began by studying his own memory. He created 2,300 meaningless syllables (to avoid association between syllables), grouped them into lists, and recorded how many he could remember.

One of his conclusions was that people

we forget very quickly during the first hour after learning, but that the forgetting curve (forgetting rate) smoothes out as time goes by.

Ebbinghaus, with his studies, already anticipated the associative theory of interference to explain forgetting, in addition to two others:

• The trace decay theory: memories eroded by the passage of time.
• The multifaceted theory of the trace: fragmentation and loss of memory components.

Origin of the study of interference

john a. Bergström, in 1892, was the one who carried out the first study on interference. He did an experiment where he asked the subjects to sort two decks of word cards into two piles. He observed that when the location of the second row was changed, sorting was slower. This fact showed that the first set of classification rules interfered in the learning of the new set.

After Bergström, in the year 1900, Georg Müller and Pilzecker, German psychologists, continued to study retroactive interference. Müller was the one who used the term inhibition as a general term to refer to retroactive and proactive inhibition.

Finally, Jenkins and Dallenbach put forth the associative theory of interference to explain forgetting; we will see it below.

Associative theory of interference: experimental study

The associative theory of interference poses that forgetting is a matter of interference, inhibition, or destruction of the old material by the new (although the reverse also happens, as we will see later).

Jenkins and Dallenbach carried out an experimental study where a group of subjects had to learn a list of CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words. Subsequently, memory was evaluated at "X" hours of sleep or wakefulness (from 1 to 8 hours).

The results showed how the "awake" group (more exposed to stimuli that could cause interference) remembered significantly less than the "asleep" group. Thus, the authors attributed these differences to the interference that the stimuli could have caused in the waking condition.

types of interference

The associative theory of interference posits that memories encoded in long-term memory are forgotten and not remembered. can be retrieved in short-term memory effectively, since "memories" or memories interfere or are hindered each other.

So, it is considered that in learning processes, forgetting is produced by the interference of certain memories on others. There are two types of interference:

proactive interference

Also called proactive inhibition, appears when the information learned ("old" information) makes it difficult to retain or learn new information.

According to Underwood (1957), in this type of interference, forgetting will be a function of the number of experiments in which the subject participates; that is, the greater the number of experiments, the greater the forgetfulness.

This type of interference would explain, for example, why polyglots (who speak several languages), when they are learning a new language, they have difficulty retaining the words of the new language. This frequently occurs because words already learned from other languages ​​interfere with speech (“come out”).

retroactive inference

It is the opposite phenomenon when new information makes it difficult to retain or learn previously learned information ("old" information).

According to some authors, greater retroactive interference will occur when the similarity between the interfering material and the learned material is greater.

For example, let's think of a student learning a list of English words for a test. The next day, study a list of German words. It is likely that when he wants to remember the list of words in English he will have trouble doing it, because the last words studied (in German) make it difficult to study the first ones, interfere.

Limitations of the theory

The Associative Theory of Interference only emphasizes the effects of interference. in declarative or explanatory memory, and not so much in implicit memory.

On the other hand, the theory explains why forgetting occurs, but it does not describe or explain the evolution of the forgetting rate.

• You may be interested in: "What is declarative memory?"

Extension of the theory

Other authors, Underwood and Postman (1960), suggested an extensive hypothesis of the associative theory of interference, which went beyond the laboratory. They called it the extra-experimental interference hypothesis., and in it they proposed that forgetting could be produced as a result of the interference of the subject's language habits.

However, the data found showed that the rate of forgetfulness did not seem to have any relationship with the frequency of words, or in the case of nonsense syllables, with the frequency of the pairs of constituent letters in the language english.

Bibliographic references:

• DeVega, M. (1990). Introduction to cognitive psychology. Psychology Alliance. Madrid.
• Manzanero, A.L. (2008). oblivion. In A.L. Manzanero, Psychology of Testimony (p. 83-90). Madrid: Ed. Pyramid.
• Arista, N.J. (2012). Is it possible to improve the teaching of Pathology in courses and conferences? Pathology Rev Latinoam, 50(3), 232-236.