Consider psychological research into explanations of forgetting in Short-term memory
Consider psychological research into explanations of forgetting in Short-term memory
The term forgetting is used when learnt information can’t be retrieved from both the short term memory and the long term memory. There have been many suggestions made to explain the reason that we forget information. The most common explanation came from Freud who devised the theory of repression. In his theory he believed that forgetting occurs because memories can be emotionally painful, mainly as they are the remnants of a trauma or an unpleasant event. Repression occurs when the mind represses these memories. Although this is a valid explanation for the forgetting of tragic memories it fails to explain the vast amount of forgetting of more daily occurring mundane events.
To justify forgetting within STM psychologists suggests that information stored in the STM simply disappears with time, or it is pushed out by new information. Considering that the STM only has memory duration of 18-30 seconds it is understandable that we forget information. This school of thought was studied by Peterson and Peterson (1959) who investigated the duration of the STM using the Brown-Peterson technique from which they found that memories have a physical basis or trace. These traces decay over time unless the information is passed to LTM through rehearsal. In their experiment participants were shown nonsense trigrams which consisted of 3 random consonants. They were then asked to recall them after 3 second intervals starting from 3 to 18 seconds. An interference task was used by asking the participants to count backwards in 3s between seeing the trigrams and recalling them, this prevented them from repeating or rehearsing the letter sequences. The results found that after 3 seconds 90% of trigrams were recalled correctly and after 18 seconds only 2% were correctly recalled. The study concluded that when rehearsal is allowed then performance is always around 100%. However, if rehearsal is prevented then the trigram is forgotten after around 15 seconds. They also found that the loss of information was initially rapid, followed by a decrease in loss, indicating that the classic “forgetting Curve” is evident.