In this article we will know 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 to say, it is a theory of forgetting and human memory.

Have you ever had many things explained to you in one day, and at the end of the day, you no longer remembered any of them? Or had you simply mixed up the stories? Let’s find out in detail why this happens.

The Ebbinghaus Oblivion Curve

The first researcher who studied 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 2300 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 curve (forgetting rate) smoothes out as time goes by.

Ebbinghaus, with his studies, already anticipated the associative theory of interference to explain oblivion, in addition to two others:

  • The theory of the decay of the footprint : memories eroded by the passage of time.
  • The multifaceted theory of the footprint : fragmentation and loss of the components of memory.

Origin of the interference study

John A. Bergström, in 1892, was the one who carried out the first study on interference . He did an experiment where he asked the subjects to sort two decks of cards with words in two piles. He observed that when the location of the second row was changed, the sorting was slower. This showed that the first set of sorting rules interfered with learning the new set.

After Bergström in 1900, Georg Müller and Pilzecker, German psychologists, continued to study retroactive interference. It was Müller who used the term inhibition as a general term for retroactive and proactive inhibition .

Finally, Jenkins and Dallenbach put forward the associative theory of interference to explain forgetfulness; we will see it below.

Associative theory of interference: experimental study

The associative theory of interference states that forgetting is a matter of interference, inhibition or destruction of the old material by the new one (although the reverse is also true, as we will see later).

Jenkins and Dallenbach carried out an experimental study where a group of subjects had to learn a list of CVC-type words (consonant, vowel, consonant). Subsequently, memory was evaluated at “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) remembered significantly less than the “sleeping” group. Thus, the authors attributed these differences to the interference that the stimuli may have caused in the waking condition.

Types of interference

The associative theory of interference states that memories encoded in long-term memory are forgotten and cannot be effectively recovered in short-term memory, because the “memories” or recollections interfere with or hinder each other.

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

Proactive interference

Also called proactive inhibition , it appears when learned information (“old” information) makes it difficult to retain or learn new information.

According to Underwood (1957), in this type of interference, forgetfulness 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 forgetfulness.

This type of interference would explain, for example, why polyglot (multi-lingual) people, when learning a new language, have difficulty retaining the words of the new language. This often happens because words already learned from other languages interfere with speech (“come out”).

Retroactive Inference

This is the opposite phenomenon, when new information makes it difficult to retain or learn information already learned previously (“old” information).

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

For example, let’s think of a student who learns a list of English words for an exam. The next day, he studies a list of German words. When he wants to remember the list of English words, he will probably have trouble doing 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, and not so much on implicit memory .

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

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 , and proposed that forgetting could be produced by the effect of interference of the subject’s language habits.

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

Bibliographic references:

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