Proactive inhibition

Proactive Inhibition
Proactive Inhibition is a psychological concept that describes the increased difficulty learning or remembering a set of words after that set had been learned in a previous, different context. It applies to free recall and associative or list learning procedures of assessing memory.

Theories

 * One explanation based on the notion of interference suggests that learning a new set of associations is made more difficult because the old associations continue to intrude in memory.


 * A slightly different perspective, suggests that the earlier learning distracts a learner from rehearsing the new list of words to be remembered, and so learning is reduced.


 * A different view suggests that the problem is not in learning the second, redundant list, but occurs only at the time of recall of the second list when retrieval cues overlap and recall is reduced.

Related Memory Concepts

 * [Cue-dependent forgetting]
 * [Retroactive Inhibition]