Absolute versus relative forgetting.

Wixted, John T.

doi:10.1037/xlm0001196

Cited by 6 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…In the weeks and months following the first test, the witness's memory of the once-seen face of the perpetrator will fade away due to normal forgetting (Wixted & Ebbesen, 1991;Wixted, 2022), and so will the witness's awareness of the fact that the suspect's face was seen for the first time on the initial test. Meanwhile, the witness may encounter the innocent suspect's face again multiple times (e.g., in the news, on social media, at pretrial hearings, etc.…”

Section: Memory Contamination Is a Continuous (Not An All-or-none) Ph...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Mechanisms of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence

Yilmaz¹,

Shen²,

Wixted³

2023

Preprint

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Eyewitness misidentifications have contributed to many wrongful convictions. However, despite expressing high confidence at trial, eyewitnesses often make inconclusive misidentifications on the first test conducted early in a police investigation. According to a new scientific consensus, it is important to focus on the results of the first test because, if the perpetrator is not in the lineup, the test itself leaves a memory trace of the innocent suspect in the witness’s brain. Thus, all subsequent tests of the witness’s memory for that suspect constitute tests of contaminated memory. Unfortunately, when an initial inconclusive identification comes up at trial, the Federal Rules of Evidence require that the witness be given an opportunity to explain the inconsistency. In response, witnesses often provide a believable story about why they did not confidently identify the suspect on the initial test despite doing so now (e.g., “I was nervous on the first test”). However, witnesses lack expertise in—and have no awareness of—the subconscious mechanisms that underlie memory contamination. Therefore, the explanations they provide at trial have minimal information value. The combination of a sincerely held (false) memory and a believable (but erroneous) explanation for a prior inconsistent statement is often persuasive to jurors. This is a recipe for a wrongful conviction, one that has been followed many times. The Federal Rules of Evidence were enacted almost a half-century ago, and it may be time to revisit them in light of the principles of memory that have been established since that time.

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Section: Memory Contamination Is a Continuous (Not An All-or-none) Ph...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Confronted with his prior statements, he said, "My memory gets better with time." It might be subjectively experienced that way by the witness, but more than a century of scientific research suggests that the opposite is true (Ebbinghaus, 1965;Wixted & Ebbesen, 1991, Wixted, 2022.…”

Section: Type I Explanations That Appeal To An Internal Memory Mechanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mechanisms of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence

Yilmaz¹,

Shen²,

Wixted³

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Some expectations, however, may be formulated if findings from related paradigms are taken into account. Wixted ( 2022 ) recently fitted power functions of time to recall data from several studies, in each of which, for a number of retention intervals, recall of items with a high degree of learning was compared to recall of items with a low degree of learning – high and low degrees of learning were implemented by different numbers of study trials. For these studies, Wixted ( 2022 ) found that a high degree of learning is accompanied by a lower relative rate of forgetting – i.e., a smaller forgetting rate parameter b – than a low degree of learning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wixted ( 2022 ) recently fitted power functions of time to recall data from several studies, in each of which, for a number of retention intervals, recall of items with a high degree of learning was compared to recall of items with a low degree of learning – high and low degrees of learning were implemented by different numbers of study trials. For these studies, Wixted ( 2022 ) found that a high degree of learning is accompanied by a lower relative rate of forgetting – i.e., a smaller forgetting rate parameter b – than a low degree of learning. If (mainly) selective rehearsal mediated IMDF and the remember and forget cues thus created stronger TBR and weaker TBF items, the two item types may well differ in forgetting over time and TBF information show higher relative forgetting – i.e., a larger forgetting rate parameter b – than TBR information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

To-be-forgotten information shows more relative forgetting over time than to-be-remembered information

Nickl

Bäuml

2023

Psychon Bull Rev

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People can intentionally forget studied material when cued to do so. Corresponding evidence has arisen from studies on item-method directed forgetting, in which participants are asked to forget single items directly upon presentation. We measured memory performance of to-be-remembered (TBR) and to-be-forgotten (TBF) items across retention intervals of up to 1 week and fitted power functions of time to the observed recall (Experiment 1) and recognition (Experiment 2) rates. In both experiments and each retention interval condition, memory performance for the TBR items was higher than for the TBF items, supporting the view that directed forgetting effects are lasting. Recall and recognition rates of both TBR and TBF items were well fit by the power function. However, the relative forgetting rates of the two item types differed, with a higher forgetting rate for the TBF than the TBR items. The findings are consistent with the view that TBR and TBF items differ (mainly) in recruitment of rehearsal processes and resulting memory strength.

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“…In other words, that the initial recognition of items immediately after acquisition, if you disregard the working memory effects, is the same for all stimuli (in other words, extrapolation of the retention curves to t = 0 is close to perfect independently of the type of stimulus for participants who pay close attention to all the presented stimuli). An alternative interpretation of the results could be that, for example, verbs are encoded in long-term memory differently than other stimuli such that their immediate recognition is less precise, and this in turn results in a faster rate of subsequent forgetting (e.g., see Wixted 2022 ). We speculated that in this case, if the presentation time of verbs were increased, the initial encoding would be stronger and the retention curve should move in the direction of the other stimuli.…”

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confidence: 99%

Forgetting dynamics for items of different categories

2023

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How the dynamic evolution of forgetting changes for different material types is unexplored. By using a common experimental paradigm with stimuli of different types, we were able to directly cross-examine the emerging dynamics and found that even though the presentation sets differ minimally by design, the obtained curves appear to fall on a discrete spectrum. We also show that the resulting curves do not depend on physical time but rather on the number of items shown. All measured curves were compatible with our previously developed mathematical model, hinting to a potential common underlying mechanism of forgetting.

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Absolute versus relative forgetting.

Cited by 6 publications

References 60 publications

The Mechanisms of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence

The Mechanisms of Memory versus the Federal Rules of Evidence

To-be-forgotten information shows more relative forgetting over time than to-be-remembered information

Forgetting dynamics for items of different categories

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