Retrieval Induced Forgetting in Coherent Narrative Text

3246 Words7 Pages

Retrieval Induced Forgetting in Coherent Narrative Text

The definition of forgetting is to lose the memory of something from

the mind. Two possible reasons one forgets are either the memory is

not in the brain or it is there but just can not be found. Forgetting

can be useful for allowing new memories of similar items to be

remembered. This would be useful in a situation like trying to

remember a new boy/girl friends name and forgetting the old ones. Yet

it also works the other way around. Not being able to remember the new

boy/girl friends name because the old on is stuck in your head. This

would not be useful.

text=retrieval">Retrieval induced forgetting is a phenomenon which says that in

addition to retrieving desired memories, the act of remembering

information inhibits related memories. Many studies have been done

looking at this phenomenon. Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork (1994) did a

study to see if retrieval induced forgetting occurred in groups of

categories. In the experiment the researchers gave people lists of

categorized words and then asked them to retrieve some of the words

from some of the categories. Then during another memory test, hit

rates were lower for items that had not previously been retrieved but

that came from a category from which other category members had been

retrieved than for items that were in category groups from which no

items had been retrieved. The researcher's explanation was that

activation of related words causes retrieval inhibition of words from

the same semantic category.

Macrae and Macleod (1999) ran three experiments, experiment 1 and 3

being

impression formation and experiment 2 as a mock examination.

Experiment 1 was to test whether or not retrieval induced forgetting

applies to issues and processing operations in social cognition. The

experimenters informed the participants that their task was to form

impressions of two men, John and Bill. Participants were to study

index cards that had 10 traits about John and ten traits about Bill.

Each trait set of cards had a subgroup that had five traits to form a

More about Retrieval Induced Forgetting in Coherent Narrative Text

Open Document