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 the consequence of removing any

previously existing knowledge that is contradicted by the new

information. Hence, according to Loftus, forgetfulness is due to a

potential loss of memory.

A Question of Inaccessibility

However, Bekerian and Bowers (1983) and Christiaansen and Ochalek

(1983) contended that the original information is not lost from

memory, but is merely rendered inaccessible or non-retrievable.

Bekerian and Bowers argued that in Loftus's studies, the recognition

test items are presented in random order and not in the order in which

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the queried information occurred in the original slide sequence. Thus

the retrieval environment does not closely match the original encoding

environment. The misleading information effect may occur because

subjects are unable to access the original information effectively

under these conditions and instead retrieve the postevent information.

They found that if the test reinstated the original environment more

fully, subjects are able to access the original information

effectively and misled subjects perform as well as control subjects.

It was thus concluded that the access of original memories depends on

the retrieval environment, especially features present at the time of

original encoding. ...

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