Interference

AO1

Retroactive: Current attempts interfere with past learning. Muller - pariticipants given nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes and then recall after retention interval. Performance was poorer if given an intervening task during the retention interval as it produced RI as the later task interfered with what had already been learned.

Proactive: Past learning interferes with current learning: Underwood analysed studies and found that those who were given 10 lists remembered 20% after 24 hours compared to those given one list that remembered 70%. 

Similarity of materials: McDonald and McGeoch - given list of 10 adjectives and in resting interval of 10 minutes they were given list B. If list B was synonyms of list A then recall was 12%, if it was nonsense syllables recall was 26% and if it was numbers recall was 37%. Thus, interference is strongest when materials are more similar and decay can't explain this.

Real-world study: Baddeley and Hitch rugby season - some played all and some…