Alfanuari 19019002

Advanced Reading

Week 13

Paraphrasing

Interference in Memory

Interference occurs when one piece of information is suppressed by another which arrives
earlier or later, or when more than one piece of information is input. According to interference
theory, short-term capacity's limited ability renders it vulnerable to interference when stimuli
arrive at a rapid pace. When competing information is stored in short-term storage, the resulting
crowding has an effect on a person's memory for specific objects. The individual suffers from
encoding failure, which is a type of memory loss caused by encoding problems. Example, if you
look up a friend's home phone number and then her mobile number, the second number would
almost certainly conflict with your ability to recall the first. Moreover, when a person is faced
with a large amount of new knowledge, such as meeting a group of new people and trying to
remember all of their names, interference in memory is more likely to occur. Encoding failures
are more likely to occur in situations where there is an overload of knowledge.

Information learned both before and after a person learns something can affect his or her
memory for that information. For instance, if you studied French on Tuesday morning and
Spanish on Tuesday night before taking a test on Wednesday morning, you'll probably
experience some interference on your exam, depending on which language you were tested on.
These interference are referred to as constructive and retroactive interference by psychologists
(or inhibition). The effects of previously learned or presented information cause proactive
intervention, or proactive inhibition, which results in a decline in accurate recall of information
(the interference you experience from studying French before you studied Spanish) Retroactive
interference, or retroactive inhibition, is a decrease in accurate recall of information as a result of
the subsequent presentation of different information (the interference your experience from
studying Spanish after you studied French). The similarities of them make the interference even
worse. The two types of interference are illustrated in the figure 9.11. Proactive and retroactive
interference can explain the most failures to recall information from long-term memory.

The consequences of proactive and retroactive interference can be seen in a variety of

situations. For instance, you are listening a series of 5 minutes long speeches. You will be most
likely to remember the first and last speeches, based on research on interference. There will be
no constructive or retroactive interference with the first speech. However, both constructive and
retroactive intervention can affect your memory of the middle speeches. Political campaign
managers try to utilize on those effects in scheduling their candidates’ speeches. For example,
they encourage candidates to speak both early in the campaign and late in the campaign, just
before the vote. Knowledgeable campaign managers try to schedule their candidate either first or
last, if several candidates are to speak in succession at one event.

Interference with Attention

According to Schacter (2001), one of the most irritating forms of memory loss is
absentmindedness, which is caused by interference with focus. This problem plagues almost
everyone, even for those who have excellent memories, because this type of interference
prevents information from getting into long-term memory. In the other words, absentmindedness
is encoding failure. You can't recall where you placed your keys because the information isn't
stored anywhere. This is a common problem, because the struggle for our attention causes us to
overlook those stimuli at crucial points in the information flow through the memory system. As a
result, we do not remember where we put our keys, whether we locked the car, or when we
decided to meet a friend for coffee.

People's attention is divided as they attempt to pay attention to several things at once,
which is another way interference affects attention. Both encoding and retrieval processes are
hampered by divided attention, but the results are not equal: Distraction during encoding is a
much more serious issue than distraction during retrieval.

Interference with attention was used to explain what is called the Stroop effect for many
years. People are given the names of colors written in various colors of ink in the stroop test.
Most people find it difficult to focus on the word and disregard the color of ink when reading the
colors names in column A aloud. Their performance for column A is slower and has more errors
than when they read column B, where all the words are printed in black ink, or when they read
column C, where all the word are printed in the color of ink that matches the name of the color.
The color of the ink produces interference. This explanation sounds reasonable, however, a more
recent explanation of the stroop effect has focused on a more complex interaction of selective
attention and cognitive processing.