Forgetting Due to Retroactive Interference: A Fusion of Müller and Pilzecker's (1900) Early Insights into Everyday Forgetting and Recent Research on Anterograde Amnesia

Abstract

Ebbinghaus' seminal work suggested that forgetting occurred as a function of time. However, it raised a number of fundamental theoretical issues that still have not been resolved in the literature. Müller and Pilzecker (1900) addressed some of these issues in a remarkable manner but their observations have been mostly ignored in recent years. Müller and Pilzecker (1900) showed that the materials and the task that intervene between presentation and recall may interfere with the to-be-remembered items, and they named this phenomenon "retroactive interference" (RI). They further asked whether there is a type of RI that is based only on distraction, and not on the similarity between the memoranda and the interfering stimuli. Their findings, and our follow up research in healthy volunteers and amnesiacs, confirm that forgetting can be induced by any subsequent mentally effortful interpolated task, irrespective of its content; the interpolated "interfering" material does not have to be similar to the to-be-remembered stimuli.

Wakeful rest alleviates interference-based forgetting

“…Müller &Pilzecker, 1900), andWixted (2004) has proposed that any interfering event can cause the loss of pre-consolidated memories. In support of this, Dewar et al (2007) reported that a range of distractor tasks impair recall in comparison with a no-interference control condition. They asked participants to remember a list of nouns and, during an 8 min retention interval, participants were subjected to different types of distraction in different conditions.…”

“…Recent research continues to replicate this effect (e.g. Della Sala, Cowan, Beschin, & Perini, 2005;Dewar, Cowan, & Della Sala, 2007) and so retention might be similarly aided by a period of wakeful rest that occurs before RI. It has been proposed that delaying interference by employing a rest period allows the memory to become more resistant to subsequent interference (Wixted, 2004) and numerous studies published in the twentieth century explored this "temporal gradient" of RI.…”

“…The distractor tasks used by Dewar, Alber et al (2012) required participants to identify differences between pairs of pictures, hence the memory and distractor task were quite distinct. Whilst Dewar et al (2007) have shown that any form of distractor task can disrupt recall, such dissimilar distractors are predicted to have a very mild effect on retention in neurologically intact humans . Indeed, some classic studies have determined that RI is more substantial and damaging when there is a degree of similarity between the interfering stimuli and to-be-memorised items (e.g.…”

Persistence and plasticity in the human memory system: An empirical investigation of the overwriting hypothesis

“…McGeoch & McDonald, 1931). However, recently both conclusions have been re-evaluated (Dewar et al, 2007;Wixted, 2004; also see Skaggs, 1933). Wixted (2004) for example, makes a distinction between specific retroactive interference (S-RI) and non-specific retroactive 47 CHAPTER 1.…”

“…Wixted (2004) suggests that "new learning draws on a limited pool of resources that may have otherwise been available to consolidate the original learning" (p.247). However, a recent experiment suggests that retroactive interference occurs even when no intentional learning is required (Dewar et al, 2007 …”