The associative theory of interference: studying forgetting

This theory provides an explanation for the phenomenon of how memories fade from memory.

In this article we are going to learn 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 simply mixed up the stories? Let's learn in detail why this happens.

The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

The first researcher to study forgetting as a psychological process in memory paradigms was the German Hermann Ebbinghaus, who carried out his work on forgetting and on 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 was able to remember.

One of his conclusions was that people forget very quickly during the first hour after learning, but that the forgetting curvebut that the forgetting curve (forgetting rate) smooths 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 theory of trace decayThe theory of trace decay: memories eroded by the passage of time.
• The multifaceted theory of the tracefragmentation and loss of memory components.

Origin of the study of interference

John A. Bergström, in 1892, carried out the first study on interference.. He conducted an experiment where he asked 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 sorting rules interfered with learning the new set.

Subsequent to Bergström, in 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 forward the associative theory of interference to explain forgetting; we will see it below.

Associative theory of interference: experimental study

The associative theory of interference posits that that forgetting is a matter of interference, inhibition or destruction of the old material by the new (although it also happens the other way around, as we shall see below). (although it also happens the other way around, as we will see later).

Jenkins and Dallenbach conducted an experimental study in which a group of subjects had to learn a list of CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) type words. Subsequently, recall was evaluated after "X" hours of sleep or wakefulness (from 1 hour to 8).

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

Types of interference

The associative theory of interference posits that memories encoded in long-term memory are forgotten and cannot be retrieved in short-term memory effectively, as the "memories" or recollections interfere or hinder each other.

Thus, it is considered that in learning processes, forgetting is caused by the interference of certain memories over others.. There are two types of interference:

Proactive interference.

Also called proactive inhibitionIt appears when the learned information ("old" information) hinders the retention or learning of the 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 forgetting.

This type of interference would explain, for example, why polyglots (people who speak several languages), when learning a new language, have difficulty retaining the words of the new language. This often occurs because words already learned from other languages, interfere in speech ("come out").

Retroactive inference

This is the opposite phenomenon, when new information hinders the retention or learning of previously learned information ("old" information). ("old" information).

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

For example, think of a student who learns a list of English words for an exam. The next day, he studies a list of German words. It is likely that when you want to remember the list of words in English you will have problems to do so, because the last words studied (in German) make it difficult to study the first ones, they interfere.

Limitations of the theory

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

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

• 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.The data found, however, showed that the rate of forgetting did not seem to have any relation to the frequency of words, or in the case of nonsense syllables, to the frequency of the constituent letter pairs in the word.

However, the data found showed that the rate of forgetting did not seem to have any relation to the frequency of words, or in the case of nonsense syllables, to the frequency of the constituent letter pairs in the English language.

Bibliographical references:

• De Vega, M. (1990). Introduction to Cognitive Psychology. Alianza Psicología. Madrid.
• Manzanero, A.L. (2008). El olvido. In A.L. Manzanero, Psicología del Testimonio (pp. 83-90). Madrid: Ed. Pirámide.
• Arista, N.J. (2012). is it possible to improve the teaching of Pathology in courses and conferences? Patolog Rev Latinoam, 50(3), 232-236.