About Psychological Theories of Forgetting

The field of psychology recognizes several theories of how people forget as well as how they build inaccurate memories. Some of these theories overlap and some have different names, depending on the literature. The major recognized theories are cue-dependent, distortion, interference, repression and fading. Physiological disorders also can cause memory loss.

Types

Cue-dependent or retrieval forgetting is when a person cannot retrieve a memory without certain cues or reminders. An example is when you recognize somebody at a party but cannot figure out how you know her, but the next day when you see her clerking at the grocery store, you remember.

Identification

Distortion is the type of memory issue that people sometimes call selective memory. For example, a person might only remember certain aspects of a relationship or exaggerate certain components of one. When a romantic relationship disintegrates, the person left behind might remember the good times and forget the difficult ones.

History

Retroactive interference occurs when a new occurrence changes an older memory. This is ongoing, because information held in memory is being changed continuously as a result of individual experience and changes in knowledge, beliefs and attitudes. Longer-term memories are less susceptible to this restructuring than newer ones.

Consolidation involves the archiving of new memories into long-term memory and can be disrupted by interference before the memories are solidified.

This memory disorder has gained attention in regard to criminal investigations, when police contribute to the development of inaccurate recollections by witnesses. It has been shown that a person who saw a red car, for example, will start to remember seeing a blue one if something leads him to believe that is in fact what happened.

Also, any intervening information a witness picks up between the time the event happened and later relating it can cause memory interference. This is evident when a witness's story continues to evolve with different information as time passes.

Proactive interference occurs when an old memory disrupts the formation of a new one. For example, a person trying to remember a friend's new phone number will probably mix it up with the number they knew previously.

Effects

Sigmund Freud was the pioneer of the concepts of repression and suppression, or motivated forgetting. Motivated forgetting occurs when a person consciously or subconsciously pushes away a threatening or anxiety-generating experience from conscious memory. Afterward the memory cannot be retrieved except through hypnosis or therapy, or sometimes it appears spontaneously after many years.

A controversial phenomenon resulting from this theory is recovered false memory syndrome, in which people sometimes retrieve memories which turn out to be untrue. Brown University is conducting an ongoing Recovered Memory Project to collect valid reports of traumatic events being completely forgotten and then remembered later. As of 2005, the project had collected 101 cases where the memories had been corroborated by other evidence. These memories typically are of childhood sexual abuse or other severely upsetting events such as physical abuse or witnessing a murder.

This memory issue also can be an aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder

Time Frame

Fading, or trace decay, is the common experience of memories disappearing little by little over time. In short-term memory, this fading can occur quickly, such as when a person only needs to remember a phone number for the time it takes to dial it.

Once information has been transferred to long-term memory, most theorists believe it remains there permanently. When people cannot remember something, it is because the retrieval method is not working as efficiently as it once did.

Considerations

Physiological issues such as brain damage from an accident, a disease such as Alzheimer's or other dementia or simply the aging process can inhibit memory retrieval. This can affect either long-term or short-term memory, or the ability to form new memories.

Resources

• Several theories of forgetting
• Brown University's Recovered Memory Project