1. Overview

2. History

3. Measurements
    Free recall  Prompted (cued) recall  Relearning method  Recognition 

4. Theories
     Cue-dependent forgetting    Organic causes    Interference theories    Trace decay theory  

5. Impairments and lack of forgetting

6. Social forgetting

7. See also

8. References

9. Sources

10. External links

Studies show that retention improves with increased rehearsal. This improvement occurs because rehearsal helps to transfer information into long-term memory^[4] – practise makes perfect.

It is subject to delicately balanced optimization that ensures that relevant memories are recalled. Forgetting can be reduced by repetition and/or more elaborate cognitive processing of information. Emotional states are just one of the many factors that have been found to effect this process of forgetting.^[3] As a disorder or in more severe cases this may be described as amnesia.

Forgetting functions (amount remembered as a function of time since an event was first experienced) have been extensively analyzed. The most recent evidence suggests that a power function provides the closest mathematical fit to the forgetting function.^[5]

It is inability to encode, to store and retrieve the previously learned information from long-term memory over varying periods of times.

Overview

Failing to retrieve an event does not mean that this specific event has been forever forgotten. This could just mean the information was not encoded well. Research has shown that there are a few health behaviors that to some extent can prevent forgetting from happening so often.^[6] One of the simplest ways to keep the brain healthy and prevent forgetting is to stay active and exercise. Staying active is important because overall it keeps the body healthy. When the body is healthy the brain is healthy and less inflamed as well.^[6] Older adults who were more active were found to have had less episodes of forgetting compared to those older adults who were less active. A healthy diet can also contribute to a healthier brain and aging process which in turn results in less frequent forgetting.^[6] Reviewing information in ways that involve active retrieval seems to slow the rate of forgetting. Paul Connerton stated that there are seven types of forgetting, which are repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting, formation of new identity, structural amnesia, annulment, planned obsolescence, and humiliated silence.^[7]

History

One of the first to study the mechanisms of forgetting was the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885). Using himself as the sole subject in his experiment, he memorized lists of three letter nonsense syllable words—two consonants and one vowel in the middle. He then measured his own capacity to relearn a given list of words after a variety of given time period. He found that forgetting occurs in a systematic manner, beginning rapidly and then leveling off. Although his methods were primitive, his basic premises have held true today and have been reaffirmed by more methodologically sound methods.^[8] The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve is the name of his results which he plotted out and made 2 conclusions. The first being that much of what we forget is lost soon after it is originally learned. The second being that the amount of forgetting eventually levels off.^[9]

Around the same time,{{when|date=May 2016}} psychologist Sigmund Freud theorized that people intentionally forgot things in order to push bad thoughts and feelings deep into their unconscious, a process he called "repression".^[10]

There is debate as to whether (or how often) memory repression really occurs^[11] and mainstream psychology holds that true memory repression occurs only very rarely.^[12]

Modern terminology divides motivated forgetting into unconscious repression (which is disputed) and conscious thought suppression. Psychogenic amnesia is another controversial diagnosis of retrograde amnesia without physical injury to the brain.

Measurements

The four ways forgetting can be measured are as follows:

Free recall

Free recall is a basic paradigm used to study human memory. In a free recall task, a subject is presented a list of to-be-remembered items, one at a time. For example, an experimenter might read a list of 20 words aloud, presenting a new word to the subject every 4 seconds. At the end of the presentation of the list, the subject is asked to recall the items (e.g., by writing down as many items from the list as possible). It is called a free recall task because the subject is free to recall the items in any order that he or she desires.

Prompted (cued) recall

Prompted recall is a slight variation of free recall that consists of presenting hints or prompts to increase the likelihood that the behavior will be produced. Usually these prompts are stimuli that were not there during the training period. Thus in order to measure the degree of forgetting, one can see how many prompts the subject misses or the number of prompts required to produce the behavior.^[13]

Relearning method

This method measures forgetting by the amount of training required to reach the previous level of performance. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) used this method on himself. He memorized lists of nonsensical syllables until he could repeat the list two times without error. After a certain interval, he relearned the list and saw how long it would take him to do this task. If it took fewer times, then there had been less forgetting. His experiment was one of the first to study forgetting.^[13]

Recognition

For this type of measurement, a participant has to identify material that was previously learned. The participant is asked to remember a list of material. Later on they are shown the same list of material with additional information and they are asked to identify the material that was on the original list. The more they recognize, the less information is forgotten.^[13]

Theories

The four main theories of forgetting apparent in the study of psychology are as follows:

Cue-dependent forgetting

Organic causes

Forgetting that occurs through physiological damage or dilapidation to the brain are referred to as organic causes of forgetting. These theories encompass the loss of information already retained in long-term memory or the inability to encode new information again. Examples include Alzheimer's, amnesia, dementia, consolidation theory and the gradual slowing down of the central nervous system due to aging.

Interference theories

Trace decay theory

Trace decay theory explains memories that are stored in both short-term and long-term memory system, and assumes that the memories leave a trace in the brain.^[18] According to this theory, short-term memory (STM) can only retain information for a limited amount of time, around 15 to 30 seconds unless it is rehearsed. If it is not rehearsed, the information will start to gradually fade away and decay. Donald Hebb proposed that incoming information causes a series of neurons to create a neurological memory trace in the brain which would result in change in the morphological and/or chemical changes in the brain and would fade with time. Repeated firing causes a structural change in the synapses. Rehearsal of repeated firing maintains the memory in STM until a structural change is made. Therefore, forgetting happens as a result of automatic decay of the memory trace in brain. This theory states that the events between learning and recall have no effects on recall; the important factor that affects is the duration that the information has been retained. Hence, as longer time passes more of traces are subject to decay and as a result the information is forgotten.

One major problem about this theory is that in real-life situation, the time between encoding a piece of information and recalling it, is going to be filled with all different kinds of events that might happen to the individual. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude that forgetting is a result of only the time duration. It is also important to consider the effectiveness of this theory. Although it seems very plausible, it is about impossible to test. It is difficult to create a situation where there is a blank period of time between presenting the material and recalling it later.^[18]

This theory is supposedly contradicted by the fact that one is able to ride a bike even after not having done so for decades. "Flashbulb memories" are another piece of seemingly contradicting evidence. It is believed that certain memories "trace decay" while others don't.{{Citation needed|date=March 2007}} Sleep is believed to play a key role in halting trace decay,{{Citation needed|date=March 2007}} although the exact mechanism of this is unknown.

Impairments and lack of forgetting

Forgetting can have very different causes than simply removal of stored content. Forgetting can mean access problems, availability problems, or can have other reasons such as amnesia caused by an accident.

An inability to forget can cause distress, as with posttraumatic stress disorder and hyperthymesia (in which people have an extremely detailed autobiographical memory).

Social forgetting

Psychologists have called attention to "social aspects of forgetting".^[19] Though often loosely defined, social amnesia is generally considered to be the opposite of collective memory. "Social amnesia" was first discussed by Russell Jacoby, yet his use of the term was restricted to a narrow approach, which was limited to what he perceived to be a relative neglect of psychoanalytical theory in psychology. The cultural historian Peter Burke suggested that "it may be worth investigating the social organization of forgetting, the rules of exclusion, suppression or repression, and the question of who wants whom to forget what".^[20] In an in-depth historical study spanning two centuries,Guy Beiner proposed the term "social forgetting", which he distinguished from crude notions of "collective amnesia" and "total oblivion", arguing that "social forgetting is to be found in the interface of public silence and more private remembrance".^[21]

See also

• Amnesia
• Cue-dependent forgetting
• Experience curve effects
• Educational psychology
• Hyperthymesia
• Language attrition
• Lotus tree
• Memory
• Pseudodementia
• Repressed memory
• Tip of the tongue

References

Sources

• {{Citation

• McLeod, S. A. (2008). Simply Psychology; . Retrieved 19 February 2012, from Simply Psychology

External links

• The End of Forgetting An article by Jeffrey Rosen
• Forgetting: High School Psychology
• Causes of Forgetting & Learning
• Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind

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