Lecture 17 - Incidental Forgetting Flashcards
What is incidental forgetting?
- No intention to forget
What is motivated forgetting?
- Events that make people sad = will to forget
When do we forget?
- Trace decay
- Interference
- Retrieval induced forgetting
Why do we forget?
- Blocking
- Inhibition
What is the relationship between time and forgetting?
- Forgetting increases as time progresses
- Logarithmic relationship
- Nonsense syllables used and looks at retention intervals to produce a forgetting curve
What was a study on forgetting personal memories?
- 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
What is the nature of forgetting?
- Recognition is easier than recall
- Availability: is item is in memory store
- Accessibility: if item can be retrieved
How can you tell if something is permanently lost?
- Both unavailable and inaccessible memories are forgotten
What is trace decay?
- 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
What is interference?
- 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
What are the two components of interference?
- 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.
What are the two types of interference?
- Retroactive: new info affects similar old memories
- Proactive: old memories interfere with new memories
What is a study showing retroactive interference?
- 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
What did Baddeley & Hitch do?
- 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
What was the exp for proactive interference?
- 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.
What is retrieval induced forgetting?
- 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
When is RIF irl?
- 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
What is associative blocking?
- Cue fails to elicit target trace because it repeatedly elicits a stronger competitor
What is an exp with blocking?
- 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
What is inhibition?
- 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
