Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 proactive interference, 
information learned earlier disrupts the recall 
of newer material. Suppose, as a student of foreign languages, you fi rst learned 
French in the 10th grade, and then in the 11th grade you took Spanish. When in the 
12th grade you take a college achievement test in Spanish, you may fi nd you have 
diffi culty recalling the Spanish translation of a word because all you can think of is 
its French equivalent (Bunting, 2006).
In contrast,
 retroactive interference 
refers to diffi culty in the recall of informa-
tion because of later exposure to different material. If, for example, you have diffi -
culty on a French achievement test because of your more recent exposure to Spanish, 
retroactive interference is the culprit (see Figure 3). One way to remember the differ-
ence between proactive and retroactive interference is to keep in mind that proactive
interference progresses in time—the past interferes with the present—whereas retro-
active interference retrogresses in time, working backward as the present interferes 
with the past (Jacoby et al., 2007).
interference
The phenomenon by 
which information in memory disrupts 
the recall of other information.
cue-dependent forgetting
Forgetting 
that occurs when there are insuffi cient 
retrieval cues to rekindle information 
that is in memory.
proactive interference
Interference in 
which information learned earlier 
disrupts the recall of newer material.
retroactive interference
Interference 
in which there is diffi culty in the recall 
of information learned earlier because 
of later exposure to different material.
“He must have forgotten something.”
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Study Alert
Memory loss through decay 
comes from nonuse of the 
memory; memory loss 
through interference is 
due to the presence of 
other information in memory.
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