One type of interference is emotional. Fear may paralyze recall. Anxious self-consciousness, or stage fright, has prevented the recall of many a well-learned speech, and interfered with the skilful performance of many a well-trained act.
Distraction is an interference, since it keeps the stimulus from exerting its full effect. Sometimes the stimulus that is present has been linked with two or more responses, and these get in each other's way; as you will sometimes hear a speaker hesitate and become confused from having two ways [{356}] of expressing the same thought occur to him at almost the same instant.
Helps in recall.
There are no sure rules for avoiding these intricate interferences; and, in general, recall being a much less manageable process than memorizing, we do not have anything like the same mass of practical information regarding it. One or two suggestions have some value, however.
(1) Give the stimulus a good chance. Look squarely at the person whose name you wish to recall, avoiding doubt as to your ability to recall it; for doubt is itself a distraction. Put yourself back into the time when you formerly used this person's name. In extemporaneous speaking, go ahead confidently, avoid worry and self-consciousness, and, full of your subject, trust to your ideas to recall the words as needed. Once carried away with his subject, a speaker may surprise himself by his own fluency.
(2) Drop the matter for a while, and come back to it afresh. Sometimes, when you cannot at once recall a name, it does no good to keep doggedly hunting, while half an hour later you get it without the least trouble. The explanation of this curious phenomenon is found in interference and the dying out of interference. At your first attempt to recall the name, you simply got on the wrong track, and thus gave this wrong track the "recency" advantage over the right track; but this temporary advantage fades out rapidly with rest and leaves the advantage with the track most used in the past.
The rule to drop a matter when baffled and confused, and take it up again when fresh, can be used in more complex cases than hunting for a name. When, in trying to solve any sort of problem, you find yourself in a rut, about the only escape is to back off, rest up, and make an entirely fresh start.
Recognition
The fourth question propounded at the beginning of the chapter, as to how we can know that the fact now recalled is what we formerly committed to memory and now wish to recall, is part of the larger question of how we recognize. What we recognize includes not only facts recalled, but also facts not recalled but presented a second time to the senses. Recognition of objects seen, heard, touched, etc., is the most rudimentary form of memory. The baby shows signs of recognizing persons and things before he shows signs of recall. A little later, he recognizes and understands words before he begins to speak (recall) them; and everybody's vocabulary of recognized words remains much greater than his speaking vocabulary. We recognize faces that we could not recall, and names that we could not recall. In short, recognition is easier than recall.