Language Transfer - Proactive Interference and Negative Transfer in Psychology

Proactive Interference and Negative Transfer in Psychology

During the 1950s, memory research began investigating interference theory. This refers to the idea that forgetting occurs because the recall of certain items interferes with the recall of other items. Throughout the 1950s, researchers provided some of the earliest evidence that the prior existence of old memories makes it harder to recall newer memories and he dubbed this effect "proactive interference." During the same time, researchers began investigating negative transfer. Negative transfer concerns itself with a detrimental effect of prior experience on the learning of a new task, whereas proactive interference relates to a negative effect of prior interference on the recall of a second task.

The most obvious and used proactive interference and negative transfer paradigm from the 1950s and 1960s was the use of AB-AC, or AB-DE lists. Participants would be asked to learn a list of paired associates in which each pair consists of a three letter consonant vowel consonant, nonsense syllable (e.g. DYL), used because it was easy to learn and lacked pre-learned cognitive associations, and a common word (e.g. road). In this paradigm two lists of paired associations are learned. The first list, (commonly known as the AB list) would consist of nonsense syllables as a primer (which constituted the 'A' term), followed by a word (which constituted the 'B' term). The second list would consist of either the same nonsense syllable primer and a different word (A-C list) or a different nonsense syllable primer and a different word (D-E list). The AB-AC list was used because its second set of associations (A-C) constitutes a modification of the first set of associations (A-B), whereas the AB-DE list were used as a control.

Shortly afterwards proactive interference was demonstrated with the Brown-Peterson paradigm. A single Brown-Peterson trial consists of a study list, a retention interval and then a recall period. Each list may consist of a handful of related items and are presented individually every few seconds. For the duration of a short retention interval, subjects are then asked to perform an engaging distractor task such as counting backwards in sevens, or thinking of an animal with every letter in the alphabet to minimize rehearsal. Subjects are then asked to recall the items from this second list. Although the lists from previous trials are now irrelevant, the fact that they were studied at all makes it difficult for subjects to recall the most recent list.

Negative transfer was examined by researchers in the 60s and found differential learning between trials. Specifically, differences in the learning rates of list 2 provided clear evidence of the negative transfer phenomenon. Subjects learned an A-C paired association list to a criterion of all associations correct, following learning a list of A-B paired associations to criterion. Ultimately, it was found that those subjects took an increased amount of trials to complete the learning task compared to subjects who didn't learn the A-B list or from subjects who had to learn a D-E list.