Chapter 9 - Incidental Forgetting Flashcards
Incidental forgetting
Memory failures occurring without the intention to forget.
Motivated forgetting
A broad term encompassing intentional forgetting as well as forgetting triggered by motivations, but lacking conscious intention.
Forgetting curve
The logarithmic decline in memory retention as a function of time elapsed, first described by Ebbinghaus.
Accessibility/availability:
Accessibility refers to the ease with which a stored memory can be retrieved at a given point in time. Availability refers to the binary distinction indicating whether a trace is or is not stored in memory.
Consolidation
The time-dependent process by which a new trace is gradually woven into the fabric of memory and by which its components and their interconnections are cemented together.
Interference
The phenomenon in which the retrieval of a memory can be disrupted by the presence of related traces in memory.
Trace decay
The gradual weakening of memories resulting from the mere passage of time.
Contextual fluctuation
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.
Competition assumption
The theoretical proposition that the memories associated to a shared retrieval cue automatically impede one another’s retrieval when the cue is presented.
Cue-overload principle
The observed tendency for recall success to decrease as the number of to-be-remembered items associated to a cue increases.
Retroactive interference
The tendency for more recently acquired information to impede retrieval of similar older memories.
Proactive interference
The tendency for earlier memories to disrupt the retrievability of more recent memories.
Part-set cuing impairment
When presenting part of a set of items hinders your ability to recall the remaining items in the set.
Collaborative inhibition
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.
Retrieval-induced forgetting
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.
Associative blocking
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.
