Theories Of Forgetting II

One of the first people to study the mechanisms of forgetting was German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Using himself as the sole subject in his experiment, he memorized lists of three letter nonsense syllable words - two consonants and one vowel in the middle. He then measured his own capacity to relearn a given list of words after a variety of given time period. He found that forgetting occurs in a systematic manner, beginning rapidly and then leveling off. Although his methods were primitive, his basic premises have held true today and have been reaffirmed by more metholodogically sound methods.

Forgetting can have very different causes than simply removal of stored content. Forgetting can mean access problems, availability problems, or can have other reasons such as amnesia caused by an accident.

Short-term memories are often subject to forgetting, while long-term memories are rarely forgotten, though they sometimes become inaccessible.

A debatable yet popular concept is "trace decay", which can occur in both short and long-term memory. This theory, applicable mostly to short-term memory, is contradicted by the fact that one is able to ride a bike even after not having done so for decades. Flashbulb memories are another piece of contradicting evidence. It is believed that certain memories "trace decay" while others don't. Sleep is believed to play a key role in halting trace decay, although the exact mechanism of this is unknown.

Cue-Dependent Recall
Cognitive psychological theories explain that when new information is learned (encoded), it is stored in the context of other information (cues) present at the moment. Recall is most effective when the person attempts to remember again in the presence of these cues. This is known as cue-dependent recall. For instance, the recall of terms learned in a pscyhology class is best done in the room where the class is held and not, say, at the beach in the summertime. The classroom itself is a cue to effective retrieval.

Other cues can include mental associations made with the material at the time it is learned and even one's mood or state of mind (thus the term "state-dependent" remembering).



Cue-Dependent Forgetting
Cue-Dependent Forgetting refers to an inability to retrieve information when the other cues are not present. An example is trying to remember terms from psychology class while one is vacationing at the beach.

The Encoding-Specificity Principle: Implied by this process is its converse, the encoding-specificity principle. This principle asserts that recall is best in the presence of the cues that were originally present.

Mnemonics: Advantage can be taken of encoding-specificity to create powerful cues for specific terms of information that one desires to memorize. Such strategies for memory are termed mnemonics, from the Greek word mnemon, "mindful".

Ancient Greek orators, for example, used the method of loci. They would imagine themselves walking through familiar places like a building or garden. While memorizing, they would associate each object or room "encountered" in the building with a point to be made in their speech. Later, while giving the speech, they would imagine retracing their walk through the building and encountering these objects, reminding them of the points they wished to make.

A common mnemonic method used today is to think of silly rhymes or absurd images to associate with items in a list that must be set to memory. For instance, an English medical school limerick used to aid in memorizing the names of the twelve cranial nerves goes as follows: "On old Olympus' towering tops, a Finn and German viewed some hops." The first letter of each word in the limerick (O, O, O, T, etc) is the same as the first letter of each cranial nerve (Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, etc). Similarly, many college students memorize lists of structures or points by memorizing their initials in order and forming acronums of those initials, easily reproducing and decoding the acronyms during exams.




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