Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Remember—and Why Do We Forget?
Compare the cost to unpracticed information with the benefit of retrieving selected information. Relate the design to Unit 3's distinction between retained information and accessibility.
A question to consider. Why is comparing related unpracticed items with an unrelated unpracticed baseline more informative than comparing them only with practiced items?
Why this reading
Remembering some information can make related information harder to retrieve later. Storm uses this result to ask whether processes that reduce interference might benefit thinking while also producing forgetting.
Before you read
Retrieval-induced forgetting is poorer later memory for unpracticed items related to practiced items, relative to an appropriate unpracticed baseline. Inhibition is a proposed reduction in competing information's accessibility. Blocking is interference from stronger competitors at test. Mental fixation occurs when a previously useful or salient response obstructs another solution.
Read for
- Use the retrieval-practice design to identify practiced items, their unpracticed competitors, and the unrelated baseline.
- Compare the predictions of inhibition and blocking, including the consequences of the cues and output order used in the final test.
- Distinguish experimental manipulations from correlations between forgetting and resistance to fixation in the problem-solving evidence.
Consider afterwards
- Selective practice improves some answers while related unpracticed answers decline. How would you change the final cues or test order to distinguish impaired accessibility from interference by the practiced answers?
Editorial context
This short review argues for an inhibitory account while acknowledging that not every retrieval-induced forgetting effect has that cause. Murayama and colleagues' 2014 meta-analysis provides a broader assessment with results that depend partly on measurement. The association with resisting fixation is not evidence that deliberately worsening memory generally improves creativity, or that a forgetting score measures a fixed personal ability.