In our chapter on memory, we learned about the ideas of proactive and retroactive interference. Proactive interference is when something you learned in the past is interfering with what you are currently learning. Retroactive interference is when something you are currently learning is interfering with what you learned in the past. These concepts are interesting but also confusing because it is very easy to mix them up. The way I remember is that Proactive is Present; meaning that something is affecting your present learning. The word retro is associated with the past and that’s how I remember, something is affecting your past learning.
I realized while we were learning about this material that I have experienced proactive interference. In 6th grade, we began learning language in my school. We had 6th grade set as an introductory year where you would take both Spanish and French for one semester each. Then we got to decide which language we would rather take, and I decided on Spanish. After a couple of years of learning, I had a pretty basic understanding of the language. One of the first things you learn when taking a language is how to count. I tried this after a couple of years after learning and noticed every single time I would get to about 15, I would start counting in French. It was so absurd to me and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I could still count and recite all the numbers up until 100 in Spanish but when counting if I wasn’t paying very close attention to what I was saying I would always switch over to French. To this day, this still happens.
This is a perfect example of proactive interference because even though I was taking Spanish and learning it perfectly with no other hiccups when it came to counting French always would pop back into my head. Learning about proactive interference helped me to understand why this was happening and made me feel less weird about the whole thing.
