Before I begin to talk about pro and retro active interference, everyone should know what interference is. The psychological definition of interference is, ” a phenomenon of human memory involving the learning of how material where the learning of new information or behavior interacts with old learning, or memories, thoughts and behaviors that come from past learning, and interferes with the acquisition or comprehension of new information”. With this being said, there are two types of interference, proactive and retroactive. Proactive interference is when things that someone has learned in the past gets in the way of, or disrupts what you are currently trying to learn. On the other hand, retroactive interference is forgetting something learned in the past due to something that is being learned or recently learned. Both proactive, and retroactive interference typically happens due to similar events, tasks, or memories. All of this sums up what proactive and retroactive interference is.
Now knowing what these two types of interference are, I want to share some personal examples of how interference occurs in real life. The first instance occurred in math class a few weeks ago. The class was beginning to learn about solving two equations consisting of multiple variables. Having learned how to solve these in the past, I always used the substitution method for solving the equations. As I sat there in class and listened to my professor, I noticed that we were not learning how to solve the equations using the substitution method, but instead the elimination method. As I tried to learn this new way of solving the equations, my mind kept going back to the substitution method and how I solve them that way. I now know that this is a prime example of proactive interference. Another example of interference occurred to me two weeks ago. I was studying for my second biology exam of the semester and was reading over my notes from class. I began to skip and glance over material that I thought I already knew from earlier in my education. Then when me and my friends where testing each other I began to forget old material because I was so focused on the current material. This is an example of retroactive interference. These two examples show how these two interference present themselves in everyday life.