interference – Cognition in Class

April 27, 2025April 28, 2025

Studying hard but forgetting fast? Interference might be at fault

By Danika Apostolovich

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why you might have studied hard for an upcoming history exam, making sure you focus on the dates, people involved, and what countries might be involved within a war, just to completely blank and forget all of the details about what you studied when the exam is given out? This is especially frustrating when you know you put in the effort to do well on the test. Let me tell you, in college this especially gets hard when you have to balance so many different things on a daily basis.

Well Did you happen to also study for that spanish test that you have the next period after? As it turns out, the material from studying for that spanish test wound up interfering with your ability to accurately remember what you studied for the history exam.

This post will dive deeper into interference theory, specifically retroactive and proactive interference. So that when you are about to go on to your first semester of college, you can know how to avoid this unfortunate circumstance of forgetting info and instead replace it with better study techniques!

April 27, 2024May 1, 2024

Conquer Your Mind: Understanding Interference in Learning

By Haley Cutting

Introduction

Trying to learn new information while having to remember old information is hard, especially the thought of coming in as a first-year college student. The thought of trying to learn multiple classes and courses at once at a high level can be stressful, especially coming out of high school. The class schedule in college is confusing within itself. Trying to figure out how you will study for your psychology of learning exam on Monday and your cognitive psychology exam, also on Monday. When you go in to take your cognitive psychology exam, you completely forget everything you studied from earlier chapters, but can only remember everything from recent chapters. This is what is called retroactive interference (RI). This process occurs when learning a new task that then impairs the previously learned task (1). As you continue throughout the exam, you remember stuff from chapters from the start of the year. As you start remembering those earlier chapters, you cannot seem to remember anything from the chapters you just learned! This is what is called proactive interference (PI). This process occurs when the old task you learned impairs the ability to learn or remember the new task (1). There are some ways to stop these interferences from occurring for you little newcomers. To stop these from happening you need to fully understand which interference is which and what they fully mean. Here is a little acronym trick for you, Proactive = Old, Retroactive = New (“P.O.R.N”).

November 29, 2018

Remembering Information Without Making Your Brain Explode

By Kendall Geuvens

Introduction
As a freshman entering college, it is a scary thought to meeting new people, scoping a bigger school, and not to mention, the different and harder information that will be learned. A lot of freshman fears are the studying that goes into class. How much do you study, what do you study, and how do you know that you studied enough? Not every freshman is going to study and be able to remember every bit of information that is in front of them. An important way that you will be able to memorize the information is through understanding how to effectively use short term memory.

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December 3, 2017

Interfere with Interference

By Mecayela Monroe

It’s your senior year and you have one last final to take before you say goodbye to those high school halls and hello to a brand new school, town, and group of people. It is the toughest one yet; 100 multiple choice questions! You studied those flashcards last night and looked over them one more time at lunch. There is an overwhelming feeling of confidence. The test finally gets over and you happily acknowledge you had almost every answer memorized. Now that that’s over, it’s time to throw those flashcards away and enjoy summer.

I have bad news though. That method of memorization solely for the test won’t get you far in college. College curriculums are based on retention, not regurgitation. It is education for your career so short-term memorization isn’t going to cut it. High school provides students with a lot of skills but, generally speaking, high-level analytical thinking is not one of them. In order to succeed, college students must understand, retain, and apply information which requires more than just flashcards with definitions. My hope with this post, from one college student to another, is to provide you with the awareness necessary to recognize and overcome the interference problem that occurs when new education is presented.

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