9. Incidental forgetting

Question 1

Incidental forgetting

Answer 1

Memory failures occurring without the intention to forget.

Question 2

Motivated forgetting

Answer 2

A broad term encompassing intentional forgetting as well as forgetting triggered by motivations, but lacking conscious intention.

Question 3

Forgetting curve/retention function

Answer 3

The logarithmic decline in memory retention as a function of time elapsed, first described by Ebbinghaus

• information loss is very rapid at first and then levels off
• holds true for many types of learned materials.

Question 4

Accessibility/availability distinction

Answer 4

1) Accessibility
refers to the ease with which a stored memory can be retrieved at a given point in time.

2) Availability
refers to the binary distinction indicating whether a trace is or is not stored in memory.

Question 5

Interference

Answer 5

The phenomenon in which the retrieval of a memory can be disrupted by the presence of related traces in memory.

Question 6

Trace decay

Answer 6

The gradual weakening of memories resulting from the mere passage of time.

Question 7

Infantile amnesia

Answer 7

The tendency for older children and adults to have few autobiographical memories from the early years of life.

Question 8

Contextual fluctuation

Answer 8

The gradual and persistent drift in incidental context over time, such that distant memories deviate from the current context more so than newer memories, thereby diminishing the former’s potency as a retrieval cue for older memories.

Question 9

Competition assumption

Answer 9

The theoretical proposition that the memories associated to a shared retrieval cue automatically impede one another’s retrieval when the cue is presented.

Question 10

Cue-overload principle

Answer 10

The observed tendency for recall success to decrease as the number of to-be-remembered items associated to a cue increases.

Question 11

Retroactive interference

Answer 11

The tendency for more recently acquired information to impede retrieval of similar older memories.

Question 12

Proactive interference

Answer 12

The tendency for earlier memories to disrupt the retrievability of more recent memories.

Question 13

Part-set cuing impairment

Answer 13

When presenting part of a set of items (e.g. a category, a mental list of movies you want to rent) hinders your ability to recall the remaining items in the set.

Question 14

Collaborative inhibition

Answer 14

A phenomenon in which a group of individuals remembers significantly less material collectively than does the combined performance of each group member individually when recalling alone

Question 15

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF)

Answer 15

The tendency for the retrieval of some target items from long-term memory to impair the later ability to recall other items related to those targets.

Question 16

Retrieval practice paradigm

Answer 16

A procedure used to study retrieval-induced forgetting.

Question 17

Associative blocking

Answer 17

A theoretical process hypothesized to explain interference effects during retrieval, according to which a cue fails to elicit a target trace because it repeatedly elicits a stronger competitor, leading people to abandon efforts to retrieve the target.

Question 18

Unlearning

Answer 18

The proposition that the associative bond linking a stimulus to a memory trace will be weakened when the trace is retrieved in error when a different trace is sought.