Forgetting in Psychology

9 Key excerpts on "Forgetting in Psychology"

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  Current Issues in Applied Memory Research

  • Graham M. Davies, Daniel B. Wright(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Retrieval-induced forgetting

  The unintended consequences of unintended forgetting

  Malcolm D. MacLeod, Jo Saunders and Laura Chalmers

  When we are asked to think about memory and how it works we often tend to conceptualize it in terms of what we can remember, how much we can remember, and for how long we can remember it. Even for memory theorists, memory tends to be characterized in terms of its storage capacity, retention capabilities, and the processes underlying these properties (i.e., encoding, storage, and retrieval). Forgetting, in contrast, hardly gets a mention. To some extent, the reason for this is that forgetting is a largely ‘invisible’ phenomenon. Unless we know what we have forgotten, it is difficult to know that we have forgotten it! When we do become aware of weaknesses in our memorial armature, forgetting is typically seen as a nuisance or hindrance – something that should, wherever possible, be avoided. At its most benign, forgetting can be regarded as a ‘blip’ or error in an otherwise smooth-running system; something that happens from time to time when insufficient attention is being paid to what we are doing. At its most insidious, forgetting may irreconcilably alter our awareness of what is current and what is real, and even undermine our concept of self (e.g., in the advanced stages of dementia).

  Implicit in these conceptions of memory is the notion that forgetting is maladaptive or, at the very least, something that happens when memory is not working properly. Yet, there are indications that some forms of forgetting may be just as important as remembering in order for our memories to work effectively. Théodule Ribot (1887), over a century ago, recognized the potential importance of forgetting when he noted that ‘Forgetfulness, except in certain cases, is not a disease of memory, but a condition of health and life’ (p. 61). Similarly, William James (1890) drew our attention to the possibility that our memories would be much poorer if it were not for the fact that we forget. In other words, rather than considering forgetting as the inevitable product of a system that is operating less than optimally, we need to consider the possibility of forgetting as an integral part of memory – something that is intrinsically linked to our ability to remember. Arguably, without the capacity to forget, we would find it impossible to remember, at least in any purposive goal-directed manner (Macrae & MacLeod, 1999).

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  New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory

  • Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus, Denis Perrin, Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus, Denis Perrin(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part V

  Memory Failures

  Concepts and Ethical Implications

  Passage contains an image

  11 Forgetting

  Matthew Frise

  1 Introduction

  This chapter is about how you will forget this chapter. It’s about what forgetting anything is. We forget often, and psychologists research why. But neither they nor philosophers have tried much to unearth the nature of forgetting. The little shoveling in the area has turned topsoil only.

  This is odd, since forgetting is philosophically important. It looks essentially connected to, and as important as, remembering—a popular topic in the philosophy of memory. Fifty years ago, the Philosophical Review published C.B. Martin and Max Deutscher’s landmark article “Remembering,” which proposed an analysis of remembering. The literature on their paper and topic is now sizable. Commonsense puts remembering on one pole of a spectrum, and forgetting on the opposite pole. If commonsense is correct here, then a handle on forgetting looks crucial to a handle on remembering. We fully grip the poles together or not at all. Yet “forget” appears only three times in Martin and Deutscher’s paper.

  Forgetting also matters in epistemology. The fact that ordinary humans forget introduces an evaluative challenge. We forget evidence, as well as counterevidence or “defeaters.” This forgetting can be a kind of losing. But losing evidence or counterevidence can affect what it is reasonable to believe. Since epistemology is concerned with theories of reasonable belief, understanding what counts as forgetting will be crucial to evaluating these theories.1 Without this understanding, it will be hard to tell whether an apparent case involving forgetting is a counterexample to a theory.

  What’s more, the pattern of ordinary human forgetting looks epistemically significant. Kourken Michaelian (2011: 400) argues that, contrary to a standard view in epistemology, normal human forgetting “approximates a virtue” rather than a vice. It is a mean between too much forgetting and too much remembering. If Michaelian or the standard view is right, then forgetting underlies a normative epistemic status.

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  Essential Cognitive Psychology

  • Alan J. Parkin(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  As we have already noted, forgetting is a vital aspect of human memory but explanations of how it occurs still elude us. It is traditional to think of forgetting as occurring for one of three reasons: encoding failure, storage failure, or retrieval failure. Encoding failure reflects forgetting due to a failure in the consolidation process—information simply fails to enter long-term storage in the first place. Encoding failure can be observed anecdotally. If, for example, you are interrupted while speaking to someone, you may be unable to pick up the thread of what you were saying—the contents of your mind have been “lost”. At a more formal level, drugs can also interfere with the consolidation process. Under these conditions people have no difficulty remembering information prior to drug administration but are poor at remembering post-drug information (e.g. Calev et al., 1989).

  Forgetting due to storage failure assumes that information, once consolidated, can be vulnerable to the effects of information already in memory or be affected by new information entering memory. In his thoughts about memory, Aristotle drew an analogy between memories and wax tablets. According to his idea, each memory was a tablet and this could be compressed by other memories (tablets) already in memory or entering memory at a later point. He also considered that the longer a tablet remained in memory the harder it became and therefore the less vulnerable to distortion.

  Aristotle’s analogy is interesting for two reasons. First, his notion about varying “hardness” predicts that early memories are less vulnerable to disruption, a fact we saw confirmed in Chapter 5 . It is also an ancient forerunner of associative interference theory. Developed during the behaviourist era, this is the only major attempt to explain

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  The Processing of Memories (PLE: Memory)

  Forgetting and Retention

  • Norman E. Spear(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  may be found to depend on certain other factors: the nature of the task [e.g., free recall often yields more forgetting than paired-associate or recognition tasks (in which more of the verbal context of learning is presented at the test)]; the content of the events being represented in memory (e.g., forgetting may differ for words and pictures or for verbal units of differing meaningfulness); and the subject’s behavior during memory storage, which might determine “mnemonic preparation” for retrieval. But aside from the direct and indirect contributions of interference (and degree of learning) to forgetting, the striking aspect of human forgetting of verbal materials is its invariance. Underwood (1964, 1966a, 1972) has presented this point most effectively. Subjects who have learned a single set of paired verbal items in the laboratory context consistently forget about 20% after one day and about 50% after one week, and even factors such as individual differences in learning rate make surprisingly little difference.

  The real issues, then, center on aspects of the dependency between forgetting and interference: the acquisition of competing memories, the circumstances of that acquisition relative to the acquisition of the critical memory, and the interaction between the critical and competing memories up to and including the point at which retrieval of the critical memory is required. These issues are most effectively considered within the context of “sources of forgetting” generally.

  Before examining some specific sources of forgetting, we should first consider the question in its most general sense: Assuming that dominant features of behavior have evolved because of their adaptive value, why does forgetting occur? Sometimes a well-learned set of events, representations, or responses seems readily available “on demand.” At other times, perhaps even with the same memories, the learning seems to have been in vain; the memory cannot be retrieved and cannot be applied to contemporary behavior. Forgetting of crucial information at crucial times frequently costs its victims fortunes and even lives. One wonders how God and Darwin could have been so thoughtless as to permit this exasperating characteristic to have developed throughout the evolution of animals (and perhaps plants as well), to reach its apex with humans.

  On the other hand, forgetting is more a blessing than a curse. We would be in a sorry state indeed if our awareness were bombarded by all the telephone numbers we had ever learned each time we used the telephone, or by the name of every person we had ever met each time we approached a friend on the street.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Applied Memory

  • Timothy J Perfect, D Stephen Lindsay, Timothy J Perfect, D Stephen Lindsay(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Contextual change across a lifespan involves a scale of change that far exceeds laboratory demonstrations and encompasses additional dimensions such as changes to one’s selfconcept. Moffitt and her colleagues (2010) recently discovered that nearly half of all people who once suffered from a major psychiatric disorder such as depression, anxiety, alcohol or drug abuse forget those episodes when asked about them during a clinical interview. Moffitt et al. (2010) proposed that such forgetting happens particularly for people who experience a single episode of a disorder and then move on to a period of improved mental health. Current views of the self may differ so much from past views of the self that memories of the earlier psychiatric disorder are forgotten.

  In a study that had people review events recorded in old diaries, Lindsay and Read (2006) found similar cases of people forgetting major childhood events including events that extended over time such as holding different political views or being depressed. The changes in context from childhood to adulthood include where one lives, roles (middle-schooler versus professional; child versus parent), the important people in one’s life, and the context provided by recent experiences. Given that memory cues have multiplicative rather than additive effects, loss of multiple cues can lead one to forget even major life-events.

  One application of the context theory of forgetting is in the domain of eyewitness testimony. Context reinstatement is a key part of the Cognitive Interview, a method of interviewing eyewitnesses invented by Geiselman and Fisher that leads to much better recall of correct information with relatively small increases in the recall of incorrect details (see Fisher, Schreiber Compo, Rivard, & Hirn, Chapter 31 , this volume; Fisher, Geiselman, & Amador, 1989; Geiselman, Fisher, MacKinnon, & Holland, 1985; Memon, Meissner, & Fraser, 2010). Older adults benefit even more from the Cognitive Interview than do younger adults, which might reflect an age-related deficit in active retrieval processes such as reinstating context.

  ONE FORGETTING MECHANISM OR MORE?

  The mechanisms of forgetting reviewed here are not exclusive, and it is likely that more than one is needed for a complete theory of forgetting, as in most current cognitive models of memory. The physiological evidence for decay and processes of disrupted consolidation are on a different level of analysis from cognitive processes such as competition and loss of contextual cues. It would be remarkable if the human brain operated according to very different biological memory mechanisms from other mammalian species. However, some of the human behavioral data interpreted as evidence for disrupted consolidation may be alternatively described as due to other cognitive processes, as noted by Cowan et al. (2004). For example, moving amnesiacs to a quiet dark room after learning a list of words may dramatically increase the distinctiveness of the context in which the list appeared and reduce interference from other tasks in the experiment. Lewandowsky, Ecker, Farrell, and Brown (2012) model a number of effects that are classic to consolidation theory including the temporal gradient of retroactive interference and illustrate how those effects are compatible with a model where loss of temporal distinctiveness over time determines forgetting. Sederberg et al. (2011) show how variations in context can account for patterns of memory errors that some have taken as an indication of alterations made to memories during reconsolidation (Hupbach, Gomez, Hardt, & Nadel, 2007). Conflicts between accounts of forgetting should ultimately sharpen our understanding of forgetting both theoretically and practically.

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  Cognition

  From Memory to Creativity

  • Robert W. Weisberg, Lauretta M. Reeves(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  A final possible function for forgetting is that it allows us to adapt most efficiently to our changing environments. That is, if the world has changed significantly since you learned some information, so the old learning is no longer relevant, then it may be most efficient to forget it. In that case, retroactive interference would allow new information to be easier to retrieve than older and now-outdated memories. A good example is computer technology: People with extensive experience with computers who only remembered how to use the original operating systems that they learned would not be in a strong position in today's world. On the other hand, if some aspect of the world has only changed a little, then old information will still be relevant (such as switching from an early version of a smart phone to an updated model). Under those circumstances, it should be more efficient to retain old and well-learned information. There is no question that this way of functioning is on the whole adaptive. What we recall in a situation will, all other things being equal, reflect our experiences in that situation. Thus, forgetting may result in our behavior matching the long-term regularities we have encountered in the environment (Anderson & Schooler, 1991).

  Research on Forgetting: Conclusions

  We have now reviewed studies that examined forgetting for many different types of materials, including CVCs, words, pictures, and autobiographical memories of various sorts. This research has used many different types of methods, including recognition and recall tests and physiological responses, to measure retention and forgetting over intervals ranging from several minutes to several decades. Forgetting seems to be related to the type of material being learned, as well as to the amount and distribution of the original learning experiences with the material. Information without meaning, which can only be processed in a bottom-up manner, is forgotten faster, which is why forgetting for CVCs has been found to be very rapid compared with that for pictures or words (e.g., Shepard, 1967 ;Standing, 1973). In addition, both overlearning and distributed practice (i.e., spreading learning experiences out over periods of time) decrease the rate of forgetting. The wider the distribution of learning episodes in time, the less forgetting that is found (Bahrick et al., 1993).

  Accuracy of Memory for Dramatic Events: The Question of Flashbulb Memories

  One of the reasons that researchers are interested in forgetting is because it would seem that all of our memories are subject to it. However, it has been proposed that there may be one kind of memory—memory for an unexpected, dramatic, and highly emotional event—that is not subject to forgetting. The study of those memories, called flashbulb memories

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  Shakespeare and Forgetting

  • Peter Holland(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The Arden Shakespeare

    (Publisher)

  I offer the list because the kinds of cultural forgetting that Connerton sets out are important for considering Shakespeare, all of them needing to be engaged with and underpinned with a more elaborated reference, and some of which I have already started to interlace with my analysis, as, for instance, in his brief pointing towards Kundera in (i) (see pp. 70–1). That some of the seven are perhaps a little too briefly explored in Connerton’s article is only a sign of the kind of intervention he is making.

  Connerton’s purpose is in part to demonstrate that we have forgotten to engage with forgetting as a crucial and complex cultural phenomenon. But the responses published in the journal, offered by five clinical and/or cognitive psychologists,6 can, loosely, be characterized by a concern to underline the vast gulf between the disciplinary concerns of psychology and those of social anthropology. The most sympathetic, by Erdelyi, looks back at the history of psychology’s consideration of forgetting, primarily in classic work by Ebbinghaus in 1885 and Bartlett in 1932, especially the latter’s argument for forgetting as a consequence of ‘cumulative reconstructions of successive rememberings which, over months and years, resulted in a progressively less faithful rendition’, what Erdelyi dubs ‘forgetting-by-false-remembering’ (274). Erdelyi sees Connerton’s exploration of forgetting as ‘adaptive stratagem’ as a parallel to psychologies such as, most obviously, Freud’s, and he connects this with the motivation the individual has to erase earlier memories in order to create new ones, a motivation that he differentiates from the ‘desperate motivation, as is found in historical-political struggles that lead to or stave off mayhem (some of Connerton’s examples) or in clinical case histories (as in Freud’s)’ (275).7

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  Principles of Learning and Memory

  Classic Edition

  • Robert G. Crowder(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Forgetting in Short-Term Memory In this chapter we withdraw somewhat from the abstractions of primary and secondary memory in order to examine a more tangible problem for theoretical analysis: A subject who has demonstrably learned a small message can under some conditions forget it within less than a minute if he is prevented from rehearsal by a distractor task. Why? Short-term memory tasks of this sort have offered persuasive evidence for choosing from among conflicting theories of forgetting and the data are relevant to forgetting from both primary and secondary memory. Theories of Forgetting There are three major theoretical approaches to the loss of information in short-term memory, decay, displacement, and interference, and there is more than one way of organizing these three approaches. According to decay theory, the only function of a distractor task in the Brown–Peterson paradigm (the main situation of concern in this chapter) is to prevent the subject from thinking about the memory stimulus; the material processed in the distractor task makes no contribution of its own to forgetting. The displacement and interference positions, however, although not belittling the facilitation that can result from rehearsal, maintain that the contents of the distractor task are crucial in producing the loss, either (1) through displacing relevant information from a fixed-capacity store or (2) by producing some type of confusion between similar traces. On this criterion the displacement and interference theories, together, oppose decay theory. In another sense, however, it is the decay and displacement approaches that are similar to one another and in conflict with the interference approach. Both the decay and displacement theories attribute forgetting to the structural properties of the memory system, its spatial capacity (displacement) or temporal limits (decay), rather than to the information placed in the system

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  Textbook of Psychology (Psychology Revivals)

  • D.O. Hebb, D.C. Donderi(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 6

  Learning, Memory, and Forgetting

  Every student knows that learning a formula or a definition is only part of the job: it must also be remembered correctly until the examination. In this chapter we will consider memory and forgetting: what makes the results of learning persist or not persist and how error may be introduced into memories.

  Some learning is used at once and not again. You ask “What time is it?” and need remember the answer only long enough to set your watch. This is known as short-term memory. If, instead, you are a character in a detective story and need to establish an alibi, you will have to remember the answer until after you have been cross-examined in court and set free: this we call long-term memory. In these two situations, the acquisition of the learning is about the same—a momentary stimulation and one-trial learning—but the retention differs. A question to be discussed, then, is what determines retention.

  “Memory” is a slippery term. Primarily, it means the retention of the effects of learning of any kind (which is what it means in the title of this chapter), and this is the way it is generally used in psychological discussions. But it has a popular meaning too. The popular meaning includes only what you can recall. The two meanings are very different. Let us say that 2 years ago you took a course on Patagonia and learned the names of all the principal villages, but today you cannot recall one. By the popular meaning, you remember nothing from your course on Patagonia. Have you forgotten completely? It would be easy to show that forgetting is not complete—that your memory for Patagonia is not zero. There might be perhaps 50% retention, as you would see if when you relearned the names you needed only half as many trials to learn as you needed the first time (the savings method of measuring retention). Or, for another example, ask an experienced typist what finger is used to type the letter s

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