Proactive Interference
What is Proactive Interference?
Proactive interference is a psychological phenomenon where old memories hinder the ability to recall new information, making learning more difficult. This type of memory interference often occurs in everyday situations, such as struggling to remember a new password because of an old one. Understanding proactive interference can help improve learning strategies, memory retention, and cognitive flexibility.
The Basic Idea
How many times have you been urgently trying to log into your email or bank account, only to get the message “password not recognized”? You might enter the password again, thinking maybe you just mistyped it, only to get an error reminding you that you changed your password a month ago. Panic sets in as you rack your brain, trying various combinations of old passwords, until you realize that you can’t remember the most recent one you set for the life of you. For me, this usually ends in defeat as I reset my password, only to get the message “your new password cannot be the same as your previous one.”
Although the stress of being locked out of your accounts may be enough to interfere with your rational thinking and memory, there is another reason that it can be so difficult to remember new passwords: proactive interference. This type of memory contamination, sometimes referred to as proactive inhibition, describes how the things we’ve previously learned tend to make it more difficult to remember newer information, especially if they are similar. Every time you try to memorize a new password, all of the other passwords you’ve previously created (especially if they’re basically the same, just with “123” added at the end) might disrupt your ability to properly recall that memory of your new password.
Proactive interference not only makes learning new passwords a challenge, but it can make it harder to learn or remember anything new—which is essentially what we do all day, every day. While proactive interference occurs when what we’ve previously learned keeps us from remembering something new, the related concept of retroactive interference explains why it’s harder to remember older information after we’ve learned similar new information.1 However, both phenomena can interfere with activities like learning new languages or job skills, how students function in the classroom, and even learning helpful coping mechanisms when people grapple with mental health challenges.
I would very much like to remember to return my daughter’s overdue library book, why I just walked into the kitchen, and where I put my glasses. These things matter to me. In these instances we often forget not because it’s efficient for our brains to do so but because we haven’t supplied our brains with the kinds of input needed to support memory creation and retrieval.
— Lisa Genova, author of Remember, the Science of Remembering and the Art of Forgetting
About the Author
Annika Steele
Annika completed her Masters at the London School of Economics in an interdisciplinary program combining behavioral science, behavioral economics, social psychology, and sustainability. Professionally, she’s applied data-driven insights in project management, consulting, data analytics, and policy proposal. Passionate about the power of psychology to influence an array of social systems, her research has looked at reproductive health, animal welfare, and perfectionism in female distance runners.
