Forgetting: Inhibition or Interference?
Year: 2001
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Let\\xe2\\x80\\x99s suppose you are trying to remember the name of the professor that gave you \\na cognitive psychology class in your first year at university. This may turn out to be \\nquite difficult, because you have had many other classes since then with diff erent \\nprofessors. Th ere are different accounts of why this forgetting occurs. One explanation \\nis that forgetting occurs because of interference when you are trying to retrieve the \\nprofessor\\xe2\\x80\\x99s name. Because you have had classes by many other professors, the cue \\nprofessor has been associated to many other names and faces. These names and \\nfaces can interfere when you are trying to remember the name of your cognitive \\npsychology professor. Thus, according to interference accounts, forgetting is caused \\nby the addition or strengthening of competing items in memory (e.g., McGeoch, \\n1932, 1942; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981; Mensink & Raaijmakers, 1988). \\n\\nA second account of why you are unable to remember the name of your old \\nprofessor is inhibition. Over the years, there have probably been many occasions \\non which you retrieved the names of professors of more recent classes. During these \\nretrieval attempts, the name of your old professor may have been activated and this \\nmay have given rise to retrieval competition. Because your old professor was not the \\nname you were looking for, the name of your old professor may have been inhibited \\nto make the correct name more available. Because of this inhibition, the name of \\nyour old professor may have become more difficult to retrieve at a later time. Th us, \\naccording to inhibitory accounts, forgetting is caused by the active suppression of \\nmemory items when these memory items compete with the appropriate response \\n(e.g., Anderson, 2003; Anderson & Spellman, 1995; Levy & Anderson, 2002). In this \\nview, forgetting is not a passive consequence of adding new information to memory, \\nbut it is an active process. People can exert inhibitory control over the activation of \\nmemory traces.
Author: Gino Camp
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1537357963