Forgetting
FORGETTING:
• The term that is given to a person's inability to remember or recall a thing that
should have been remembered.
• Forgetting or disremembering is the apparent loss or modification of information
already encoded and stored in an individual's short or long-term memory.
• Hermann Ebbinghaus gave himself lots of new material to memorize, he invented
nonsense syllables—consonant-vowel-consonant arrangements that do not
correspond to words (such as BAF, XOF, VIR, and MEQ). He wanted to work with
meaningless materials that would be uncontaminated by his previous learning.
• He tested his memory of 420 lists of nonsense syllables after various time
intervals. Ebbinghaus concluded that forgetting is extremely rapid immediately
after the original learning and then levels off.
INEFFECTIVE ENCODING
• A great deal of forgetting may only appear to be forgetting. The information in question may
never have been inserted into memory in the first place. Since you can’t really forget something
you never learned, this phenomenon is sometimes called pseudo forgetting.
• Example, People usually assume that they know what a penny looks like, but most have actually
failed to encode this information. Pseudo-forgetting is usually due to lack of attention. Even when
memory codes are formed for new information, subsequent forgetting may be the result of
ineffective or inappropriate encoding (Brown & Craik, 2000). The research on levels of processing
shows that some approaches to encoding lead to more forgetting than others (Craik & Tulving,
1975).
• For example, if you’re distracted while you read your textbooks, you may be doing little more than
saying the words to yourself. This is phonemic encoding, which is inferior to semantic encoding for
retention of verbal material. When you can’t remember the information that you’ve read, your
forgetting may be due to ineffective encoding.
DECAY THEORY
• The Decay theory is a theory that proposes that memory fades due to the mere
passage of time. Information is therefore less available for later retrieval as time
passes and memory, as well as memory strength, wears away.
• When we learn something new, a neurochemical “memory trace” is created.
However, over time this trace slowly disintegrates. Actively rehearsing information is
believed to be a major factor counteracting this temporal decline. It is widely
believed that neurons die off gradually as we age, yet some older memories can be
stronger than most recent memories. Thus, decay theory mostly affects the short-
term memory system, meaning that older memories (in long-term memory) are
often more resistant to shocks or physical attacks on the brain. It is also thought that
the passage of time alone cannot cause forgetting, and that Decay Theory must also
take into account some processes that occur as more time passes.
What is Interference Theory?
• Interference theory suggests that forgetting happens because similar
information competes in our memory system.
• The more similar the information is, the more likely it is to interfere
with what we want to remember.
• In their study, participants memorized adjectives. Then they were
asked to learn different types of word lists that varied in similarity
(e.g., synonyms, antonyms, unrelated words, numbers).
They found that more similar new material (like synonyms) caused
more forgetting, while less similar material (like numbers) caused
less forgetting.
→ This supports the idea that interference increases with similarity.
Motivated Forgetting
• Many years ago, Sigmund Freud (1901) came up with an entirely different explanation for retrieval
failures. Freud asserted that people often keep embarrassing, unpleasant, or painful memories
buried in their unconscious.
• For example, a person who was deeply wounded by perceived slights at a childhood birthday party
might suppress all recollection of that party. In his therapeutic work with patients, Freud recovered
many such buried memories. He theorized that the memories were there all along, but their
retrieval was blocked by unconscious avoidance tendencies. The tendency to forget things one
doesn’t want to think about is called motivated forgetting, or to use Freud’s terminology, repression.
• In Freudian theory, repression refers to keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the
unconscious, Although it is difficult to demonstrate the operation of repression in laboratory studies
(Holmes, 1990), a number of experiments suggest that people don’t remember anxiety-laden
material as readily as emotionally neutral material, just as Freud proposed (Guenther, 1988; Reisner,
1998). Thus, when you forget unpleasant things such as a dental appointment, a promise to help a
friend move, or a term paper deadline, motivated forgetting may be at work.