Proactive

proactive - descriptive of any event or stimulus or process that has an effect on events or stimuli or processes that occur subsequently; "proactive inhibition"; "proactive interference" psychological science, psychology - the science of mental life retroactive - descriptive of any event or stimulus or process that has an effect on the effects of events or stimuli or process that occurred previously proactive - (of a policy or person or action) controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than waiting to respond to it after it happens active - disposed to take action or effectuate change; "a director who takes an active interest in corporate operations"; "an active antagonism"; "he was active in drawing attention to their grievances" Interference theory refers to the idea that forgetting occurs because the recall of certain items interferes with the recall of other items. In nature, the interfering items are said to originate from an overstimulating environment. In the late 1950s two groups of researchers published very similar methods that demonstrated the interference theory, a husband and wife team, Peterson and Peterson and another researcher, Brown. In one study done by Peterson and Peterson participants were asked to recall trigrams (string of three letters) at different second intervals, ( 3. 6. 9 etc..) after the presentation of the last letter in the trigram. To make the trigrams impossible to pronounce the investigator used only consonants ( e.g. BWV).. The participants were asked to count backwards to allow no time for rehearsal and for the numbers to interfere with the recall of trigrams. Each of the participants was tested eight times at each of the six delay intervals which totaled to 48 trials. The percentage of recalls decays over time due to interference of the numbers they had to count backwards. From this study Peterson and Peterson concluded that short term memory exists for a few seconds if the participant does not make an active effort to retain the information." This theory along with the decay theory have been proposed as reasons for why people forget. Evidence for this theory comes from paired associate learning, as well as from Jenkins and Dallenbach's

(1924) experiment where they researched forgetting in two students over the period of eight hours.

Types According to the theory there are three kinds of interference: proactive interference, retroactive interference and output interference.But more emphasis is placed on proactive and retroactive which often happens in our everyday life and dealings. [edit] Proactive interference Proactive interference occurs when previous learning interferes with new learning. For example, if you knew how to speak French and then tried to learn to speak Spanish, your knowledge of French would hamper your ability to learn Spanish. You might accidentally use French words when attempting to speak in Spanish. [edit] Retroactive interference Retroactive interference is new learning disrupting your previous learning. Similar to the example above, if you knew French, and then later learned to speak Spanish, your knowledge of Spanish could hamper your ability to remember French. You might recall Spanish words when trying to speak French. The Brown-Peterson task mentioned above is another example of retroactive interference. [edit] Output interference Output interference occurs when the "activity of retrieving, ITSELF", interferes with the retrieval of the actual information needed in the first place. Primarily, this is caused by the limited capacity of the short-term memory. however, the above which is proactive and retroactive has been widely been researched and proved to be the main types of interference in psychology. [edit] References Sternberg, Robert J. (2006). Cognitive psychology fourth edition. Thomson Wadsworth, 219. ISBN 0534514219.

Working memory is a theoretical framework within cognitive psychology that refers to the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information. There are numerous theories as to both the theoretical structure of working memory (see the "organizational map" that follows) as well as to the specific parts of the brain responsible for working memory. However, it is of the accepted view that the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, anterior cingulate, and parts of the basal ganglia are crucial for functioning. Much of the understanding of the neural basis of working memory has come from lesion experiments in animals and imaging experiments in humans. Today there are hundreds of research laboratories around the world studying various aspects of working memory. There are numerous applications of working memory in the field, such as using working memory capacity to explain intelligence and other cognitive abilities[1], furthering the understanding of autism[2] and ADHD,[3] improving teaching methods,[4] and creating artificial intelligence based on the human brain[5][6]. Working memory is generally considered to have limited capacity. The earliest quantification of the capacity limit associated with short-term memory was the "magical number seven" introduced by Miller (1956)[12]. He noticed that the memory span of young adults was around seven elements, called chunks, regardless whether the elements were digits, letters, words, or other units. Later research revealed that span does depend on the category of chunks used (e.g., span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around 5 for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, span is lower for long words than for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud, and on the lexical status of the contents (i.e., whether the contents are words known to the person or not)[13]. Several other factors also affect a person's measured span, and therefore it is difficult to pin down the capacity of short-term or working memory to a number of chunks. Nonetheless, Cowan (2001)[14] has proposed that working memory has a capacity of about four chunks in young adults (and less in children and old adults). [edit] Measures of working-memory capacity and their correlates Working memory capacity can be tested by a variety of tasks. A commonly used measure is a dual-task paradigm combining a memory span measure with a concurrent processing task. For example,

(Daneman & Carpenter, 1980) used "reading span". Subjects read a number of sentences (usually between 2 and 6) and try to remember the last word of each sentence. At the end of the list of sentences, they repeat back the words in their correct order. Other tasks that don't have this dual-task nature have also been shown to be good measures of working memory capacity[15]. The question of what features a task must have to qualify as a good measure of working memory capacity is a topic of ongoing research. Measures of working-memory capacity are strongly related to performance in other complex cognitive tasks such as reading comprehension, problem solving, and with any measures of the intelligence quotient[16]. Some researchers have argued[17] that working memory capacity reflects the efficiency of executive functions, most notably the ability to maintain a few task-relevant representations in the face of distracting irrelevant information. The tasks seem to reflect individual differences in ability to focus and maintain attention, particularly when other events are serving to capture attention. These effects seem to be a function of frontal brain areas[18]. Others have argued that the capacity of working memory is better characterized as the ability to mentally form relations between elements, or to grasp relations in given information. This idea has been advanced, among others, by Graeme Halford, who illustrated it by our limited ability to understand statistical interactions between variables[19]. These authors asked people to compare written statements about the relations between several variables to graphs illustrating the same or a different relation, for example "If the cake is from France then it has more sugar if it is made with chocolate than if it is made with cream but if the cake is from Italy then it has more sugar if it is made with cream than if it is made of chocolate". This statement describes a relation between three variables (country, ingredient, and amount of sugar), which is the maximum most of us can understand. The capacity limit apparent here is obviously not a memory limit - all relevant information can be seen continuously - but a limit on how many relationships we can discern simultaneously. It has been suggested that working memory capacity can be measured as the capacity C of short-term memory (measured in bits of information), defined as the product of the individual mental speed Ck of information processing (in bit/s) (see the external link below to the paper by Lehrl and Fischer (1990)), and the duration time D (in s) of information in working memory, meaning the duration of memory span. Hence: C (bit) = Ck(bit/s) × D (s).

Lehrl and Fischer measured speed by reading rate. They claimed that C is closely related to general intelligence. Roberts, Pallier, and Stankov[20] have shown, however, that C measures little more than reading speed. Moreover, the idea that working memory capacity can be measured in terms of bits has long been discredited by the work of Miller (1956)[21], who demonstrated that working memory capacity depends on the number of chunks, not the number of bits (chunks can vary dramatically in how many bits they carry: a sequence like "1 0 0 1 0 1 1" consists of seven chunks worth seven bits - less than a single word, which is just one chunk).