The Forgetting

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For example, many people say they can”t remember much about their childhood or their school days. But returning to the house in which they spent their childhood or attending a school reunion often provides retrieval cues which trigger a flood of memories. References a b Murre, Jaap M. J.; Dros, Joeri (2015). "Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus' Forgetting Curve". PLOS ONE. 10 (7): e0120644. Bibcode: 2015PLoSO..1020644M. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120644. PMC 4492928. PMID 26148023. Loftus, Geoffrey R. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition11. 2 (Apr 1985): 397–406. Woźniak, Piotr A.; Gorzelańczyk, Edward J.; Murakowski, Janusz A. (1995). "Two components of long-term memory" (PDF). Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis. 55 (4): 301–305. PMID 8713361. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2010-09-20.

See text for the meaning of the parameters. SSD is the sum of squared differences between data and fitted curve, R 2 is proportion variance explained, and AIC is the Akaike Information Criterion. The parameters are fitted for time expressed in seconds. de Bot K, Martens V, Stoessel S (2004) Finding residual lexical knowledge: The 'Savings' approach to testing vocabulary. International Journal of Bilingualism 8: 373–382. The research into the processes involved in consolidation reminds us that memory relies on biological processes, although the exact manner by which neurons are altered during the formation of new memories has not yet been fully explained. According to the trace decay theory of forgetting, the events between learning and recall have no affect whatsoever on recall. It is the length of time the information has to be retained that is important. The longer the time, the more the memory trace decays and as a consequence more information is forgotten.It was also assumed that the information that had been in the short-term store for the longest was the first to be displaced by new information, similar to the way in which boxes might fail off the end of a conveyor belt – as new boxes are put on one end, the boxes which have been on the conveyor belt the longest drop off the end. First, the memory has disappeared – it is no longer available. Second, the memory is still stored in the memory system but, for some reason, it cannot be retrieved. Ebbinghaus found that the forgetting curve is exponential in nature. It starts off very steep—the amount of retained knowledge drops dramatically soon after we acquire new information. In fact, most of the forgetting occurs within the first hour of learning. And that’s not all. After a day or two, we typically forget around 75% of what we have learned.

The surgery removed parts of his brain and destroyed the hippocampus, and although it relieved his epilepsy, it left him with a range of memory problems. Although his STM functioned well, he was unable to process information into LTM. de Bot K, Stoessel S (2000) In search of yesterday's words: Reactivating a long-forgotten language. Applied Linguistics 21: 333–353. The only independent variable in this experiment was the time-interval, which started at the end of learning a list for the first time. The time-interval ended at the beginning of learning a list for the second time. The time-intervals between learning and relearning were the same as Ebbinghaus [ 8]: 20 minutes, 1 hour, 9 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 6 days and 31 days. For each time interval, 10 lists were learned and relearned (for the 9 hour interval only 9 lists were learned due to unforeseen circumstances). Nadel L, Samsonovitch A, Ryan L, Moscovitch M (2000) Multiple trace theory of human memory: Computational, neuroimaging and neuropsychological results. Hippocampus 10: 352–368. pmid:10985275

Abstract

The basic idea behind state-dependent retrieval is that memory will be best when a person’s physical or psychological state is similar at encoding and retrieval. Rasch B, Büchel C, Gais S, Born J (2007) Odor cues during slow-wave sleep prompt declarative memory consolidation. Science 315: 1426–1429. pmid:17347444