SCHMIDT ET AL. (2000) - CHILDHOOD NEIGHBOURHOOD MEMORIES

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  • Created by: KarenL78
  • Created on: 24-08-17 21:01

AIM & METHOD:

  • Many studies of interference use artificial lab conditions and have little relevance to real life.
  • Scmidt and his colleagues devised a method of testing for interference in real-life settings by using childhood memories of street names.

AIM:

  • To assess the influence of retroactive interference upon the memory of street names learned during childhood.

METHOD:

  • 700 names randomly selcted from a database or 1700 former students of a Dutch school were sent a questionnaire.
  • 211 participants responded - age range 11 - 79 years old.  Given map of neighbourhood with all street names removed and replaced with numbers.  Asked to remember as many as possible.
  • Other personal details collected by questionnaire inc. how many times they'd moved house, where they'd lived and for how long, how often they visited the area etc.
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METHOD / RESULTS & CONCLUSION:

  • Amount of retroactive interference experienced was assessed by the number of times individuals had moved to other neighbourhoods or cities (thus learning new sets of street names).  This measurement was vairable with 25% of participants having never moved and 1 participant had moved 40 times!

RESULTS:

  • Positive association between the number of times participants had moved house outside the neighbourhood and the number of street names forgotten.

CONCLUSION:

  • Findings suggest that learning new patterns of street names when moving house makes recalling an older pattern of street names harder to do.
  • Retroactive interference does seem able to explain forgetting in some real-life situations.
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EVALUATION:

EVALUATION:

  • Number of extraneous variables that may have confounded results e.g. those who had played extensively in the neighbourhood or walked to school would probably have learnt street name to a greater extent than those who didn't play in the beighbourhood and were driven to school.
  • Methodology shows it's possible to conduct research on retroactive intereference in real-life settings.
  • It could easily be adpated to test the influence of proactive intereference too.
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