Outline And Evaluate The Main Psychological Explanations Of Forgetting

Outline and Evaluate the Main Psychological Explanations of Forgetting in both the Short and Long Term Memory

Psychologists study memory because it is important to understand how a person remembers, how they forget, and whether memory is reliable source of past information; this research is particularly important in the case of eyewitness testimonies. Memory is the process whereby a person holds on to information they have experienced. Psychologists categorise memory into 3 processes; encoding (making a memory trace), storage and retrieval. Forgetting is a breakdown in one of the 3 processes, which prohibits retrieval. There are short (STM) and long term memory (LTM) stores (Atkinson and Shriffin 1968, as cited Gross 2005) and the main
It is also supposed that a memory trace simply fades away over time and through lack of use. The only way to truly test this theory would be to have subjects take on new information, then do absolutely nothing mental or physical, until recall was tested, which would not be possible. Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924, as cited Gross 2005) attempted to get as close as possible to those conditions. They had subjects remember 10 nonsense syllables, some then went to sleep, and others carried on with their days as normal. The subjects’ recollection was then tested at various intervals, up to eight hours afterwards. The subjects who went to sleep had considerably better recall than the ones who were awake. If decay was the reason for forgetting both groups should have been the same, suggesting inference was really responsible for forgetting, this conclusion is also supported by Badderley and Hitch’s (1977, as cited Pennington and McLoughlin 2012) research on rugby players (Pennington and McLoughlin 2012). In addition decay theory cannot explain ‘flash bulb’ memories, emotive memories that can be from long ago but clearly remembered (Brown and Kulik 1977 as cited Gross
In proactive interference older memories interfere with newer ones (interference acts forwards in time); explaining why if faced with car controls that are the reverse of what you are used to, you turn the widow wipers on instead of indicating (Gross 2005). Whereas in retroactive interference newer memories interfere with old ones (interference acts backwards in time); explaining why when you learn to drive a manual car then swap to an automatic car, it is then hard if faced with driving a manual car not to try to drive it as an automatic. Schmidt et al (2000, as cited Pennington and McLoughlin 2012) studied how well people remembered the area they grew up in, they found that those who had moved the most, had the worst recollection of their childhood neighbourhood, suggesting that retroactive interference was responsible for their forgetting (Pennington and McLoughlin 2012)