Examining the Effects of Interference and Distraction on Immediate and Delayed Recall of Meaningful Words

The short-term memory is the very first system we encounter when we decide to recall information at the conscious level. The system register also gets information for a brief moment at an unconcious level. But before information can be transferred to the long-term memory, it needs to undergo rehearsal. Rehearsal maintains the validity of a code of information in the short-term memory, rehearsal needs to be done often to keep the information for a long period. Chunking of words makes it easy to be learnt and recalled, for example, a phone number may be grouped into units to help remember. The duration of unrehearsed material in the short-term memory is 30 seconds. The definition for short-term memory is that it is a system that not only stores information, but serves as a workplace for rehearsing, coding, retrieving, and decision making. In the Brown-Petterson’s paradigm a rehearsal prevention test was given to the participants to prevent them from rehearsal; similar tests will be given to the participants in this study to check the number of words they will be able to recall. The capacity of the short-term memory can also be identified using the immediate memory span, by presenting a list of words and determining how many can be remembered in their correct serial order after presentation. Baddeley and Scott (1971) proposed that due to the statements established by the Petterson’s technique, the short-term memory experiences forgetting after the participants or subjects were asked to recall the items only once in both experiments. During sudden recall the chances of the valid words being recalled is based on the serial position of the words, the first or second word has a higher advantage or ability to be remembered (primacy effect), whilst the middle words have a lower chance of recall, also the final words do have a greater chance of memorization as well, which is the recency effect (Baddeley, 2004). Various theories have been conducted to further explain these claims. Janke and Nowaczyk stated that “attention is the study of the capabilities and limitations of the individual to select and process sensory information from the environment”. It is perceived that people cannot concentrate on all information going on around them, but just on the important ones, an example is when you are caught driving on a stormy evening, you chose to turn off the stereo and quit all conversations in order to fully attend to the road to enable you drive safely (Janke & Nowaczyk, 1998).

Furthermore, the short-term memory not only stores traces of information in the brain, but also serves as a working memory for rehearsal, coding, retrieval and decision making. The interference theory is one of the major theories of interference and memory. The theory implies that new information can interrupt with the already existing information in the long-term memory after or during encoding, which leads to distorted memories (Mcleod, 2008). The proactive interference takes place when you are not able to learn something new since the old information has already been learnt and is preventing new messages, it is also forward in time since what exist in the mind interrupts the new information. An example is when you forget a friend’s new house address since the old one is still kept in the mind. The retroactive interference is when new or current information interferes with the already existing ones, leading to forgetting. An experiment was conducted to see the effect of long words on the short-term memory due to retroactive interference, and the conclusion was that long words provided greater interference than short words (Campoy, 2011). The decay theory also proposed that decay occurs as a result of the gradual fading away of memory trace, it depends on the duration of the information present in the short-term memory. Decay was also defined as the inability to be able to recall a list of words in a given time frame not caused by interference (Ricket, Vergauwe & Cowan, 2016). Decay can only be prevented through rehearsal of the material. Retrieval failure theory also states that information in the long-term memory can be inaccessible since the cues for retrieval are not present. Retrieval cues are the information stored concerning the situation. The external or context cues are things in the environment such as houses and trees, while the internal cues are inward experiences such as mood and emotions.

Aims of the Research

Several studies have been conducted to determine how attention is distracted by the effect of interference on immediate and delayed recall of a set of meaningful words. The aims used for the purpose of this study are:

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Place Order

• To determine the effect of interference on serial recall of the learnt material.
• To determine the serial position effect of recall.

Statement of Hypothesis

• H1: The participants who experienced the interference will have a lower serial recall of words.
• H2: The participants are able to recall more words at the beginning due to primacy effect than the words in the middle.
• H3: The participants are able to recall more words at the beginning due to primacy effect than the words at the end due to recency effect.

Operational Definitions of Terms

1. Interference: unwanted thought or task that intrudes on a person’s short-term memory.
2. Distraction: diverting of attention of an individual between a task of recalling words in serial order and counting down from 50 minus 3.
3. Delayed recall: retrieval of information from the memory that takes a longer time to be processed.
4. Immediate recall: retrieval of information from the short-term memory immediately after the stimuli was presented.
5. Meaning words: are those words which are nothing but made up of one or more letters which provide a complete meaning and makes sense to the reader.
6. Primacy effect: good recall of meaningful words at the beginning of a list of serially presented words.
7. Recency effect: good recall of meaningful words at the end of a list of serially presented words.

Methodology

180 participants from the University of Ghana and an uneven number of males and females were used for the research. The participants were students in their final year, and were specifically psychology students either in the main campus or the city campus. The population for this study was all final year psychology students, whilst the sample was the 180 psychology final year students who participated and were randomly assigned to both the experimental (interference) and control groups (non-interference). 80 students were randomly assigned to the interference group compared to 100 students who were randomly assigned to the non-interference group. The instruments used to conduct the study was a laptop, paper, pen, chair, table and an enclosed room. The laptop was the main equipment needed for the experiment, since the list of words expected to be recalled serially presented on the laptop in 30 seconds for the participants. The paper and pen were used by the experimenter to record the number of words recalled serially and correctly. The chair and table were used by the participant to sit on during the experiment and to support the laptop for viewing the words respectively. An enclosed room was used to conduct the study, this was done to reduce the level of distraction or some extraneous variables during the experiment. Furthermore, the experimental design used was both the experimental group and control group, where the participants were randomly assigned to each of the groups. Two rooms at the psychology department of the University of Ghana were used to conduct the research. Chairs were provided outside the department for the students to sit on until it was their turn. To prevent biases, the participants didn’t know which room was for either the experimental or control group. In the non-interference or control group the instructor told the participants to learn a list of 15 meaningful words serially of varied length for 30 seconds and recall immediately after expiration of the time. Some of the meaningful words were ‘select’, ‘achieve’, ‘operate’, ‘beauty’, ‘create’ and many others. The scoring was done by the experimenter: a mark of 1 and 0 was awarded to a correct or wrong recall of words respectively. In the experimental or interference group, the instructor informed the participants to learn a list of meaningful words serially (the same words presented to condition I or the control group) of varied length of 30 seconds. Immediately after the expiration of the 30 seconds, the participants were asked to count down from 50 minus 3 (example 50, 47, 44, and many others), and when the count ended, the participants were expected to recall the list of 15 words in serial order. A mark of 1 and 0 was awarded for correct and wrong responses respectively, the scoring is done by the experimenter. For the scoring of data, the sheet of paper contained all the meaningful words in a serial order and several spaces beside it to contain each participants response. So, for both conditions if the participant is able to correctly identify the first response, a mark of one is placed by that word and same goes for a wrong response, a mark of zero is placed by the word. The experimenter calculates the total number of correct responses of all the participants.

Results

From results obtained from the table of the group statistics, it was observed that the control group had a higher mean score, standard deviation and standard error than that of the experimental group. The variability of the sample means for the control group is greater. The independent samples t-test proves that the participants who experienced interference will have a lower recall (H1), since the p-value which is p=0.043 and 0.046 is less than 0.05 level of significance, which is due to chance. It is a directional hypothesis and applies a one-tailed test. The one-way ANOVA table was also used to determine the effect of the serial positions on recall of words. The hypothesis found is non-directional. The primacy position with N=10 was observed to have greater mean value, standard deviation and standard error than the middle and recency. The recency position was the next. The f value for the within group and between group was f=9.326. H2 and H3 which says that the participants are able to recall more words at the beginning than the middle and last words since the p value which is p=0.001 is less than 0.05 level of significance. The post-hoc test was directional and the p value was the same as ANOVA. The words at the beginning were well remembered than the middle and last words so the curve of the graph was higher at the beginning (50% and 87%) and slanted continuously to the end (22% and 17.5%) in both interference and non-interference group.

Discussion

This experiment was carried out to find out the effect of interference and distraction on immediate recall of words. The hypothesis for the study was that interference leads to lower recall of words, the words at the beginning was better recalled than the middle and the last words. The findings reviewed that the hypothesis for the study was retained since the p values were less than 0.05 level of significance in the dependent t test, as well as in the one-way ANOVA table. The graph also showed that the primacy words were better recalled than the middle and recency words. The findings supported theories which have been conducted in relation to the study, such as the interference theory, which talks about how new information can interrupt already existing ones, and the decay theory, which talks about the fading away of information. The lessons derived from this study is that rehearsal is necessary for better recall, and that interference causes a greater decay of information.

Conclusion

In summary, the short-term memory is not able to store information permanently due to its capacity. The recommendation for further research is that larger sample size should be used for better generalization.

References

1. Baddeley, A. D., & Scott, D. (1971). Short Term Forgetting in the Absence of Proactive Interference. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 23(3), 275-283.
2. Baddeley, A. D., Kopelman, M., & Wilson, B. A. ( Eds.). (2004). The Essential Handbook of Memory Disorders for Clinicians. John Wiley & Sons.
3. Janke, J. C., & Nowaczyk, R. H. (1998). Cognition. Prentice-Hall. New Jersey: Upper Saddle River.
4. McLeod, S. A. (2008). Forgetting. Simply Psychology. Retrieved: https://www.simplypsychology.org/forgetting.html
5. Ricket, T. J., Vergauwe, E., & Cowan, N. (2016). Decay Theory of Immediate Memory: From Brown (1958) to Today (2014). The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(10).