proactive - descriptive of any event or stimulus or process that has an

effect on events or stimuli or processes that occur subsequently;

"proactive inhibition"; "proactive interference"

psychological science, psychology - the science of mental life

retroactive - descriptive of any event or stimulus or process that has an

effect on the effects of events or stimuli or process that occurred
previously

proactive - (of a policy or person or action) controlling a situation by

causing something to happen rather than waiting to respond to it after
it happens

active - disposed to take action or effectuate change; "a director who

takes an active interest in corporate operations"; "an active
antagonism"; "he was active in drawing attention to their grievances"

Interference theory refers to the idea that forgetting occurs because

the recall of certain items interferes with the recall of other items. In
nature, the interfering items are said to originate from an
overstimulating environment.

In the late 1950s two groups of researchers published very similar

methods that demonstrated the interference theory, a husband and
wife team, Peterson and Peterson and another researcher, Brown.

In one study done by Peterson and Peterson participants were asked to

recall trigrams (string of three letters) at different second intervals, ( 3.
6. 9 etc..) after the presentation of the last letter in the trigram. To
make the trigrams impossible to pronounce the investigator used only
consonants ( e.g. BWV).. The participants were asked to count
backwards to allow no time for rehearsal and for the numbers to
interfere with the recall of trigrams. Each of the participants was tested
eight times at each of the six delay intervals which totaled to 48 trials.
The percentage of recalls decays over time due to interference of the
numbers they had to count backwards. From this study Peterson and
Peterson concluded that short term memory exists for a few seconds if
the participant does not make an active effort to retain the
information."

This theory along with the decay theory have been proposed as
reasons for why people forget. Evidence for this theory comes from
paired associate learning, as well as from Jenkins and Dallenbach's
(1924) experiment where they researched forgetting in two students
over the period of eight hours.

Types

According to the theory there are three kinds of interference: proactive

interference, retroactive interference and output interference.But more
emphasis is placed on proactive and retroactive which often happens
in our everyday life and dealings.

[edit] Proactive interference

Proactive interference occurs when previous learning interferes with

new learning. For example, if you knew how to speak French and then
tried to learn to speak Spanish, your knowledge of French would
hamper your ability to learn Spanish. You might accidentally use French
words when attempting to speak in Spanish.

[edit] Retroactive interference

Retroactive interference is new learning disrupting your previous

learning. Similar to the example above, if you knew French, and then
later learned to speak Spanish, your knowledge of Spanish could
hamper your ability to remember French. You might recall Spanish
words when trying to speak French. The Brown-Peterson task
mentioned above is another example of retroactive interference.

[edit] Output interference

Output interference occurs when the "activity of retrieving, ITSELF",

interferes with the retrieval of the actual information needed in the first
place. Primarily, this is caused by the limited capacity of the short-term
memory.

however, the above which is proactive and retroactive has been widely
been researched and proved to be the main types of interference in
psychology.

[edit] References

Sternberg, Robert J. (2006). Cognitive psychology fourth edition.

Thomson Wadsworth, 219. ISBN 0534514219.
Working memory is a theoretical framework within cognitive
psychology that refers to the structures and processes used for
temporarily storing and manipulating information. There are numerous
theories as to both the theoretical structure of working memory (see
the "organizational map" that follows) as well as to the specific parts of
the brain responsible for working memory. However, it is of the
accepted view that the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, anterior
cingulate, and parts of the basal ganglia are crucial for functioning.
Much of the understanding of the neural basis of working memory has
come from lesion experiments in animals and imaging experiments in
humans.

Today there are hundreds of research laboratories around the world

studying various aspects of working memory. There are numerous
applications of working memory in the field, such as using working
memory capacity to explain intelligence and other cognitive abilities[1],
furthering the understanding of autism[2] and ADHD,[3] improving
teaching methods,[4] and creating artificial intelligence based on the
human brain[5][6].

Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The

earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term
memory was the "magical number seven" introduced by Miller
(1956)[12]. He noticed that the memory span of young adults was
around seven elements, called chunks, regardless whether the
elements were digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research
revealed that span does depend on the category of chunks used (e.g.,
span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around 5 for
words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For
instance, span is lower for long words than for short words. In general,
memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly
depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud, and on the
lexical status of the contents (i.e., whether the contents are words
known to the person or not)[13]. Several other factors also affect a
person's measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the
capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks.
Nonetheless, Cowan (2001)[14] has proposed that working memory has
a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and less in children
and old adults).

[edit] Measures of working-memory capacity and their

correlates

Working memory capacity can be tested by a variety of tasks. A

commonly used measure is a dual-task paradigm combining a memory
span measure with a concurrent processing task. For example,
(Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) used "reading span". Subjects read a
number of sentences (usually between 2 and 6) and try to remember
the last word of each sentence. At the end of the list of sentences, they
repeat back the words in their correct order. Other tasks that don't
have this dual-task nature have also been shown to be good measures
of working memory capacity[15]. The question of what features a task
must have to qualify as a good measure of working memory capacity is
a topic of ongoing research.

Measures of working-memory capacity are strongly related to

performance in other complex cognitive tasks such as reading
comprehension, problem solving, and with any measures of the
intelligence quotient[16]. Some researchers have argued[17] that working
memory capacity reflects the efficiency of executive functions, most
notably the ability to maintain a few task-relevant representations in
the face of distracting irrelevant information. The tasks seem to reflect
individual differences in ability to focus and maintain attention,
particularly when other events are serving to capture attention. These
effects seem to be a function of frontal brain areas[18].

Others have argued that the capacity of working memory is better

characterized as the ability to mentally form relations between
elements, or to grasp relations in given information. This idea has been
advanced, among others, by Graeme Halford, who illustrated it by our
limited ability to understand statistical interactions between
variables[19]. These authors asked people to compare written
statements about the relations between several variables to graphs
illustrating the same or a different relation, for example "If the cake is
from France then it has more sugar if it is made with chocolate than if
it is made with cream but if the cake is from Italy then it has more
sugar if it is made with cream than if it is made of chocolate". This
statement describes a relation between three variables (country,
ingredient, and amount of sugar), which is the maximum most of us
can understand. The capacity limit apparent here is obviously not a
memory limit - all relevant information can be seen continuously - but
a limit on how many relationships we can discern simultaneously.

It has been suggested that working memory capacity can be measured

as the capacity C of short-term memory (measured in bits of
information), defined as the product of the individual mental speed Ck
of information processing (in bit/s) (see the external link below to the
paper by Lehrl and Fischer (1990)), and the duration time D (in s) of
information in working memory, meaning the duration of memory
span. Hence:

C (bit) = Ck(bit/s) × D (s).

Lehrl and Fischer measured speed by reading rate. They claimed that C
is closely related to general intelligence. Roberts, Pallier, and
Stankov[20] have shown, however, that C measures little more than
reading speed. Moreover, the idea that working memory capacity can
be measured in terms of bits has long been discredited by the work of
Miller (1956)[21], who demonstrated that working memory capacity
depends on the number of chunks, not the number of bits (chunks can
vary dramatically in how many bits they carry: a sequence like "1 0 0 1
0 1 1" consists of seven chunks worth seven bits - less than a single
word, which is just one chunk).