Are Forgotten Memories Lost, or Just Irretrievable ?

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Are Forgotten Memories Lost, or Just Irretrievable ?.Discuss.

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Introduction

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman, it makes

the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful

record. (Maurois, 1929) Memories are events in our daily life that are

either retained because they are personally significant or lost

because of their insignificance. Retained memories may be of a vivid

quality but their accuracy upon retrieval is questionable, containing

minor or major errors.

Substitution of the Old for the New

Loftus (Loftus & Loftus,1980) provided evidence disproving the view

that all memories are permanent and thus potentially recoverable. It

was argued that when people are given new and misleading information

about a previously seen incident, they are often unable to remember

the original incident accurately and that the "forgetting" observed

under these conditions is due to the loss of original memories once

new information has been encoded. That is, substitution of the old

information for the new has occured. This updating of old memories is

assumed to be automatic and has