Emily Holly and Amber Hee
Anything new has a learning curve. A new cellphone means learning new features. A company changing its computer systems means learning an entirely new email system. Even something as simple as remembering to write the new year on a check can be a learning process. It is not always easy, either. The struggle we have with learning something new is known as “proactive interference,” defined as “when previously learned information disrupts one’s ability to learn and remember new information.”
Lindsey Lilienthal, Associate Professor of Psychology at Penn State Altoona, has been studying proactive interference for years. Most recently student-researchers Amber Hee, Emily Holly, and Vincent Restauri, working under Lilienthal’s direction, compared two approaches to reducing proactive interference using Psychology 100 students as volunteers.
“Things you learned in the past interfere with your ability to learn in the present,” Lilienthal explains. Proactive interference can have an impact anywhere: during research “it even affects people in the lab. We think that proactive interference plays an important role in the lab as people do our tests.”
In a 2019 study “we wanted to try reducing proactive interference in the lab to improve their memory,” she continues. The researchers found that “making things more distinct helped. It worked.” The 2022 study “compares two different approaches—our old one and another one done by other people. Which one works better? That was the big purpose—comparing two possible ways.” The results were good, Lilienthal says: “The way we had come up with turned out to be more effective,” although, she admits, “it could have gone a couple of different ways.
The student-researchers did a lot of prep work before bringing in the volunteers for the proactive interference study. “We started with group meetings,” Hee, a second-year psychology major who is on track to complete her degree in three years, says. “Every week Dr. Lilienthal would explain what we’re doing. Eventually we discussed how to write a research paper. We would meet with a group once a week to talk about who should we mention, what should we talk about.” They received a lot of support from Lilienthal. “She helped us every week. She’s very good with us. We talked about grad school and about what careers we can go into.”
For the 2022 study, participants were presented with three conditions of a location memory task—target, array, and baseline—on a desktop computer. Hee describes the test: “Circles would appear on the screen and the participants would have to remember where those circles were. With the target color, all the other circles were white and the target changed color each time. Baseline was when the circle was red and all the other circles were white. With the array, all the other circles changed color. We would watch them do a practice, then leave them to do it.”
“Each condition took about 10 minutes,” Holly says. “The baseline condition was the control. The target color was most effective. We found that when the circle changed color each time, they would remember it better.” After running students through the tests, the student-researchers would get together and discuss their results.
Participating in undergraduate research can open many doors for a student. Holly, a second-year nutritional sciences major who is minoring in psychology, knew “I wanted to get involved in research at college. I want to make an impact. I went to a Black Student Union meeting where they talked about getting involved in research.” She says, “I came in as a pre-med major. I needed something beefy to put on my resume so I went to Dr. Lilienthal.”
Hee also understands the benefits that participating in undergraduate research can bring. “I wanted to do some type of research because it’s helpful—a good way to get my foot in the door,” she says. But she also realized she can apply what she’s learned to her life outside of research. “It got me thinking about how I could use this in my everyday life to remember things I need to do.”
In March 2023 some of the student-researchers—Hee and Restauri, as well as Grace Jacobs and Eva Sun—attended the Eastern Psychological Association’s annual meeting, where they presented their poster on “Comparing Two Approaches of Reducing Proactive Interference in Working Memory.” As far as the study goes, Lilienthal says that they “finished data collection last fall” and that there is a possibility of publishing their study results.
—Therese Boyd, ’79