Week 9
Memory Seminar
My topic is interference for this week in seminar. I believe my questions are fairly
straightforward and can be easily found in the articles. However, for some of the articles, it is
not necessary to read the entire article. Read for as long as you feel like so that it leaves you
with a good impression of the overall article. If you have any questions about these articles,
please contact me and I will do my best to help you. Good luck!
Watkins & Watkins (1975)
1) What is the cue-overload effect? How does it apply to research on memory? How does
Experiment 1 demonstrate this effect?
2) How do you think the Brown-Peterson Task acts as interference?
3) After reading this article, how would you define interference? Can you see it defined in any
other way?
Kiesel et. al (2010)
4) What is the task-switching paradigm? How does this apply to interference and memory
research?
5) What is stimulus-based interference? What makes it univalent vs. bivalent?
6) What do you see as the most “costly” impact to task switching tasks?
Pashler (1994)
7) What is the psychological refractory period effect (PRP)? What are some factors that can
influence this effect?
8) What is the concept of capacity sharing?
Martin et. al (2011)
9) What do typical PM studies look like? Also, what has the previous literature shown about
PM?
10) What do individuals do during breaks in an experiment? What does this do to the
experiment? Why do you need a distractor task?
11) Why do you think the experimenters chose to have participants experience the short and
long filler task as well as the short and long ongoing task duration?
12) The researchers used the median instead of the mean to analyze their data. Why is it good
practice to use the median instead of the mean?
13) What was the novel finding of this experiment to the existing literature?
Hicks et. al (2000)
14) Who pioneered the way for memory research? What was his/her major finding?
15) What are the general findings from each experiment?
Overview Questions
16) What do you see as the most detrimental form of interference?
17) How important do you see the study of interference on memory research? Do you think
researchers can study memory without taking some form of possible interference into account?