Simons Center for Systems Biology Seminar

What are the chief causes of forgetting? Several causes are well established and accepted: For short-term memory, limited capacity is a cause of forgetting. There are reasons to believe long-term memory does not suffer from a similar capacity limitation and that memory traces remain more or less permanent if undisturbed. Nonetheless those traces may exhibit forgetting due to failures of retrieval. Accepted causes of retrieval failure are competition (aka interference, cue overload), context change, and addition to traces that occur when they are retrieved.

Bob Bjork, Elizabeth Bjork and Michael Anderson highlighted another possible cause of long-term forgetting in a 1994 paper reporting a cued recall paradigm that exhibited Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF). They argued that the RIF was due to inhibition causing a reduction in trace strength of a trace that is retrieved but is not the one desired. Ashleigh Maxcey and colleagues published several papers using a design like that of Bjork et al., but using recognition rather than cued recall. They also found RIF, and also interpreted that as due to inhibition.

We report two tests of inhibition, one in the recognition paradigm and one in the cued recall paradigm, finding no RIF in either, showing that inhibition does not cause forgetting or is at most a minor contributor to forgetting.