%0 Journal Article
%T Nonspecific Retroactive Interference in Children and
Adults
%A Jillen Fatania
%A Tom Mercer
%J Archive of "Advances in Cognitive Psychology".
%D 2017
%R 10.5709/acp-0231-6
%X Retroactive interference (RI) is a primary source of forgetting and occurs when new information disrupts or damages an existing memory. Prior research has shown that children are susceptible to RI when the to-be-remembered and interfering information are similar, but it is unclear whether they are also vulnerable to nonspecific RI . This form of interference occurs when a memory is disrupted by an unrelated and dissimilar distractor task, and the present study explored six- and seven-year-olds susceptibility to such nonspecific RI. In two experiments, participants learnt a list of words and completed a free recall test 5 min later. During the interval, participants either remained quiet (the control condition) or completed spot-the-difference puzzles (the interference condition). In Experiment 1, the children were highly susceptible to nonspecific interference, whereas a sample of adults were not affected by the interfering task. However, when a new sample of children were given more time to encode and retrieve the words in Experiment 2, they were able to resist interference. Nonspecific RI can damage childrenĄ¯s memory, but they do have the ability to prevent this form of interference in certain circumstances
%K retroactive interference
%K memory development
%K nonspecific interference
%K forgetting
%U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5771508/