In order to prevent forgetting it is important to consider why forgetting occurs
The most frequent reason for forgetting information is difficulty in transferring it from working memory to long-term memory. In addition, we can forget because of an inability to recall information that is in long-term memory.
There are many theories to consider which explain why forgetting occurs, one of them being interference- When something gets in the way of something else. When used in the study of forgetting it refers to the tendency for one memory to ‘interfere with’ the accurate retrieval of another memory. There are two types of interference, proactive and retro active. PI is when past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something. RI is when current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning.
Support for interference theory comes form Jenkins and Dallenbach (1924), who found that after learning lists of nonsense syllables, participants ‘ recall was much better when intervening time had been filled primarily with sleep rather than a comparable period of being awake.
However, Tulving and Pstoka(1971) found that when participants in a memory test were given cued recall the previous effects of interference disappeared. This shows that interference effects may simply mask what is actually in memory, i.e the information is there but cannot be retrieved.
Another study which could explain forgetting is Retrieval failure, which is when person fails to successfully recover from memory failure something that was previously learned. This may not be lost completely but cannot be retrieved at that particular time. Research tends to support the importance of retrieval cues, for example Miles and Hardman (1998) found that people who learned a list of words while exercising on a static bicycle remembered them better when exercising again than while at rest. An additional criticism is the Penfield (1958) study, which stimulated the temporal lobes of patients to test retrieval of otherwise forgotten memories. Only 40 of 520 patients could retrieve real memories and most of these resembled dreams rather than memories.
The third theory which explains forgetting is cue-dependent forgetting, this is when information may be stored in memory but may be inaccessible unless there is a specific cut to help retrieve it.
Some psychologists believe that all forgetting is cue-dependent forgetting. Michael Eysenck (1988) says ‘it is probable that this is the main reason for forgetting in LTM’. There is a considerable amount of research to show the importance of cues and how they trigger memory. As we have seen, retrieval is best when conditions during recall match those during original learning. The encoding specificity principle further states that a cue doesn’t have to be exactly right, but the closer the cue is to the thing you’re looking for, the more useful it will be.
