Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

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ONE CENT
FIGURE 2 
One of these pennies is the 
real thing. Can you fi nd it? Why is this 
task harder than it seems at fi rst? 
(Source: Nickerson & Adams, 1979.)
If y
ou don’t ha
ve a penn
y handy, 
the corr
ect answ
er is “A.
”
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234 Chapter 
7 
Memory
material often recall more of the initial information 
when taking later tests than they did on earlier tests. 
If decay were operating, we would expect the opposite 
to occur (Payne, 1986). 
Because decay does not fully account for forget-
ting, memory specialists have proposed an additional 
mechanism:
 interference. 
In interference, information 
in memory disrupts the recall of other information 
(Naveh-Benjamin, Guez, & Sorek, 2007; Pilotti, 
Chodorow, & Shono, 2009).
To distinguish between decay and interference, 
think of the two processes in terms of a row of books 
on a library shelf. In decay, the old books are constantly 
crumbling and rotting away, leaving room for new 
arrivals. Interference processes suggest that new books 
knock the old ones off the shelf, where they become 
inaccessible. 
Finally, forgetting may occur because of
 cue-
dependent forgetting, 
forgetting that occurs when 
there are insuffi cient retrieval cues to rekindle infor-
mation that is in memory (Tulving & Thompson, 1983). For example, you may not 
be able to remember where you lost a set of keys until you mentally walk through 
your day, thinking of each place you visited. When you think of the place where 
you lost the keys—say, the library—the retrieval cue of the library may be suffi cient 
to help you recall that you left them on the desk in the library. Without that retrieval 
cue, you may be unable to recall the location of the keys.
Most research suggests that interference and cue-dependent forgetting are key 
processes in forgetting (Mel’nikov, 1993; Bower, Thompson, & Tulving, 1994). We 
forget things mainly because new memories interfere with the retrieval of old ones 
or because appropriate retrieval cues are unavailable, not because the memory trace 
has decayed.
Proactive and Retroactive 
Interference: The Before 
and After of Forgetting
There are actually two sorts of interference that infl uence forgetting: proactive and 
retroactive. In