Situational Factors in Forgetting

Abstract

EXPERIMENTS¹ showing that interference theory² can account for the forgetting of learned responses have often involved an experimental group of subjects (i) learning n responses to n stimuli by the paired associates procedure, (ii) learning a new set of responses to the same stimuli and (iii) after a delay relearning the first set of responses. The speed of relearning of this group is compared with that of a control group which does nothing during stage (ii). The experimental group usually takes more trials to relearn than the control, displaying forgetting attributable to retroactive interference. But initially it seems difficult to apply the results of such experiments to everyday forgetting because in this case different responses are apparently rarely learned to identical stimuli. An experiment of Bilodeau and Schlosberg³ seems to ease the general application of interference theory. It showed that if stage (ii) of the paradigm we have just described occurs in a different situation from that of stages (i) and (iii), less retroactive interference is found than if it occurs in the same situation. Situations, then, are stimuli which can have different responses learned to them in everyday life thus causing forgetting.