The Psychology and Neuroscience of Forgetting

Abstract

Traditional theories of forgetting are wedded to the notion that cue-overload interference procedures (often involving the A-B, A-C list-learning paradigm) capture the most important elements of forgetting in everyday life. However, findings from a century of work in psychology, psychopharmacology, and neuroscience converge on the notion that such procedures may pertain mainly to forgetting in the laboratory and that everyday forgetting is attributable to an altogether different form of interference. According to this idea, recently formed memories that have not yet had a chance to consolidate are vulnerable to the interfering force of mental activity and memory formation (even if the interfering activity is not similar to the previously learned material). This account helps to explain why sleep, alcohol, and benzodiazepines all improve memory for a recently learned list, and it is consistent with recent work on the variables that affect the induction and maintenance of long-term potentiation in the hippocampus.

PassPoints: Design and longitudinal evaluation of a graphical password system

“…Psychological theories have attributed forgetting to decay through the passage of time and to interference, in which new items in memory disrupt existing ones (retroactive interference) or, conversely, are disrupted by existing ones (proactive interference). A recent review emphasizes the importance of retroactive interference in everyday forgetting (Wixted, 2004).…”

Development and testing of TraumaGameplay: an iterative experimental approach using the trauma film paradigm

“…It has been proposed that tasks taxing the working memory (WM) shortly after initial learning (i.e. during memory consolidation) may interfere retroactively with memory consolidation (Wixted, 2004). …”

Neuronal correlates of serial position performance in amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

“…Encoding and consolidation processes strongly depend on hippocampal functioning (Wixted, 2004), although the exact role of the hippocampus in these processes is still a matter of debate. For example, it is not clear to date whether the hippocampus is involved in the consolidation process for only a limited amount of time, i.e., until the information has been transferred to association cortices (Squire, 1992); or whether the hippocampus is required to represent and re-encode the information each time it is remembered, so that memory contents are combined into a multiple-trace representation in the brain over the lifespan ("Multiple trace theory" (Nadel & Moscovitch, 1997)).…”