Forgetting (AQA A Level Psychology)

Peter had practised a lot for his piano recital, mostly practising alone in his room. However, once he arrived at the concert hall and started to play in front of the audience, Peter struggled to remember the piece. Instead, he kept playing sections from a different piece of music he had learned for his last recital.

Discuss theories of forgetting as explanations for Peter’s experience as described in the stem above.

Regina Phalange has conducted an experiment titled, The effects of similarity on recall of episodes of ‘Friends’. Her work has been published in The Journal of Psychobabble, volume 6, issue number 8, pages 354-361. The year of publication is 2004.

Present the above citation as it would appear in the References section of a psychological report.

Professor Memento is interested in finding out how students memorise information so he decides to conduct some case studies using 5 sixth-form students as participants.

Suggest two methods that Professor Memento could use to obtain qualitative data from his participants.

Outline how Professor Memento would use content analysis to analyse the findings of the case studies. 

Evaluate interference theory as an explanation of forgetting. 

Janis is interested in state-dependent forgetting. She obtains a sample of 15 year-old students from her school: half of them are given cough medicine, which makes them drowsy, while they learn some difficult spellings: the other half of the sample are not given cough medicine while they learn the difficult spellings. Janis asks the students to return a day later to recall the difficult spellings: the first group are given the same cough medicine during the recall phase while the second group are given no cough medicine during the recall phase. Janis reads out each individual’s student’s score on the spelling test to the rest of the participants.

Outline two ethical problems with this research.  

A researcher investigated retrieval failure using an independent groups design.

 In Condition A, 10 participants learnt 30 words and recalled them in the same room.

 In Condition B, another 10 participants learnt the same 30 words in one room and recalled them in a different room.

 The results for Condition B are shown below.

                Table 1 

The researcher decided to use the mean to analyse the results.

Another explanation for forgetting is interference.

Using an example, explain what is meant by retroactive interference.

Aaron was upset as he left the Spanish exam.   In the unfamiliar room and full of nerves, his mind had gone completely blank. He was regretting studying both French and Spanish because he was sure he had mixed up lots of the words.

Outline one explanation of forgetting. How might this explanation account for Aaron’s poor performance in the Spanish exam?

Briefly evaluate the explanation of forgetting you have outlined in your answer to Question 02.