Lecture 17 - Incidental Forgetting

Question 1

What is incidental forgetting?

Answer 1

• No intention to forget

Question 2

What is motivated forgetting?

Answer 2

• Events that make people sad = will to forget

Question 3

When do we forget?

Answer 3

• Trace decay
• Interference
• Retrieval induced forgetting

Question 4

Why do we forget?

Answer 4

• Blocking
• Inhibition

Question 5

What is the relationship between time and forgetting?

Answer 5

• Forgetting increases as time progresses
• Logarithmic relationship
• Nonsense syllables used and looks at retention intervals to produce a forgetting curve

Question 6

What was a study on forgetting personal memories?

Answer 6

• Performed because you can’t be tested on what you don’t know e.g what did you do a month ago?
• Looked at forgetting rates for people’s memory for widely publicised events on TV/newspapers
• Distinct, dateable, Recall and recognition tested
• Recall dropped from 60 to 30% before rate of forgetting slows
• Recall is worse than recognition

Question 7

What is the nature of forgetting?

Answer 7

• Recognition is easier than recall
• Availability: is item is in memory store
• Accessibility: if item can be retrieved

Question 8

How can you tell if something is permanently lost?

Answer 8

• Both unavailable and inaccessible memories are forgotten

Question 9

What is trace decay?

Answer 9

• Memory trace = physical change in brain
• If traces are not used, they decay
• Memory activation may fade but underlying memory is left intact
• Memory structural elements - associations degrade along with its activity levels
• Difficult to prove behaviourally as people can recall things they thought were forgotten

Question 10

What is interference?

Answer 10

• Hard to differentiate between similar memories
• Number of similar traces increase over time
• Arises when cue used to access a target when associated with other memories

Question 11

What are the two components of interference?

Answer 11

• Competition assumption: cue that activates all of its associates to some degree and these fight with one another. Increases with number of competitors.
• Cue-overload principle: recall decreases with the number of to be remembered items that are paired with the same cue.

Question 12

What are the two types of interference?

Answer 12

• Retroactive: new info affects similar old memories
• Proactive: old memories interfere with new memories

Question 13

What is a study showing retroactive interference?

Answer 13

• Exp condition and control condition have a learning phase: learning list 1(random word pairings)
• ppts then either do filler activity OR learn related pairs of words (exp)
• Test all ppt on list 1
  R:
• More training of list 2 = better memory
• Introduction of second list impairs recall of first list
• More training on list 2 = higher impairments in list 1

Question 14

What did Baddeley & Hitch do?

Answer 14

• Ask rugby players to recall names of teams they played earlier
• Ppts who missed games = decay not interference, people who were present during games but still forgot = interference
• Time was not a good predictor of forgetting (more interference=worse memory)
• Forgetting increased with number of intervening games

Question 15

What was the exp for proactive interference?

Answer 15

• Control condition: do filler activity, Exp condition = learn list 1, both learn list 2
• Test people on list 2
  R:
• Lots of variability in results due to number of previous lists that people had learnt
• PI effects are more severe for recall rather than recognition.

Question 16

What is retrieval induced forgetting?

Answer 16

• Retrieval can harm recall of other memories related to the retrieved item
• Retrieval practise paradigm: learning phase with items in categories
• Retrieval practise phase: some categories and some items in category (repeated)
• Final recall test = categories and all items in categories
• Retrieval of one item = very good at it, recovery of items were not retrieved = performance worse = worse than baseline too

Question 17

When is RIF irl?

Answer 17

• School in short answer questions and essay questions
• Context of interrogation of witnesses: watching slideshow of crime scene, interrogated about some objects in slideshow
• Interrogating about some items impaired related items

Question 18

What is associative blocking?

Answer 18

• Cue fails to elicit target trace because it repeatedly elicits a stronger competitor

Question 19

What is an exp with blocking?

Answer 19

• Encoding large set of words
• Unrelated puzzle task (seemingly)
• Puzzles may be similar to words in the study phase
• Puzzles related to earlier words (but not the earlier words) were solved more poorly.
• Memory blocks - original encoded word gets in way of new word

Question 20

What is inhibition?

Answer 20

• Reduction in activity level of a contextually inappropriate response
• Allows an unwanted response to be stopped and an alternative response to be executed
• Results a long term difficulty in producing the inhibited response
• Occurs in both motor and memory domains
• If a word is truly inhibited = harder to recall generally whether tested with the cue given in a study phase or with an unrelated cue.
• It predicts that RIF should generalise to new cues, thus exhibiting cue independence = not predicted by blocking/unlearning