Explanations of Forgetting
Explanations of Forgetting
Forgetting is ‘the inability to recall or recognise material that was previously stored in memory’, and there have been several explanations provided from a variety of studies investigating how we forget. Depending on whether information is forgotten from sensory memory, short term memory (STM) or long term memory (LTM) it can be due to a lack of availability or accessibility. A lack of availability is where information is not present in STM due to decay and displacement, and a lack of accessibility is in the LTM due to cue dependency and interference.
Forgetting occurs in the STM as it has a limited duration and capacity; once these limits are reached, information is forgotten. If information is forgotten from STM therefore it is unavailable, however LTM’s duration and capacity are theoretically unlimited so any information that is forgotten from here is only inaccessible – in memory somewhere but not retrievable for some reason.
Decay from STM is where chemical memory traces fade after 15-30 seconds without rehearsal, so presumably some sort of structural change takes place during learning, and according to decay theory, metabolic processes occur over time which cause the engram (memory trace) to degrade unless maintained by rehearsal, causing the memory to become unavailable. Peterson and Peterson (1959) conducted a study which supports decay theory as the average number of trigrams recalled was high when there was a short delay in recall, and nearly 70% of trigrams had been forgotten after a 9 second delay suggesting the duration of STM is only a few seconds and that decay can take place due to forgetting things over time. However, there are difficulties with this study and decay theory in general as other effects need to be excluded. Ideally, a study should get participants to receive information then do nothing physically or mentally for a set amount of time and then test recall, but this is impossible.
Jenkins and
Forgetting is ‘the inability to recall or recognise material that was previously stored in memory’, and there have been several explanations provided from a variety of studies investigating how we forget. Depending on whether information is forgotten from sensory memory, short term memory (STM) or long term memory (LTM) it can be due to a lack of availability or accessibility. A lack of availability is where information is not present in STM due to decay and displacement, and a lack of accessibility is in the LTM due to cue dependency and interference.
Forgetting occurs in the STM as it has a limited duration and capacity; once these limits are reached, information is forgotten. If information is forgotten from STM therefore it is unavailable, however LTM’s duration and capacity are theoretically unlimited so any information that is forgotten from here is only inaccessible – in memory somewhere but not retrievable for some reason.
Decay from STM is where chemical memory traces fade after 15-30 seconds without rehearsal, so presumably some sort of structural change takes place during learning, and according to decay theory, metabolic processes occur over time which cause the engram (memory trace) to degrade unless maintained by rehearsal, causing the memory to become unavailable. Peterson and Peterson (1959) conducted a study which supports decay theory as the average number of trigrams recalled was high when there was a short delay in recall, and nearly 70% of trigrams had been forgotten after a 9 second delay suggesting the duration of STM is only a few seconds and that decay can take place due to forgetting things over time. However, there are difficulties with this study and decay theory in general as other effects need to be excluded. Ideally, a study should get participants to receive information then do nothing physically or mentally for a set amount of time and then test recall, but this is impossible.
Jenkins and