Forgotten but not gone: Savings for pictures and words in long-term memory.

Abstract

Five experiments examined the relearning of words, simple line-drawing pictures, and complex photographic pictures after retention intervals of 1 tb 10 weeks. For those items that were neither recalled nor recognized, the identical item was relearned better than an unrelated control item, as measured by a recall test following relearning. This relearning advantage in recall held tbr all three classes of material and extended to the cross-modality case (i.e., picture-word and wordpicture) and the same-referent case (i.e., two pictures of the same object). However, recognition tests of relearning failed to detect this same relearning advantage for apparently forgotten items. Taken together, these findings conflict with the existing account of savings. Most fundamental, the classic argument that relearning serves a trace-strengthening function is undermined by the observed recall-recognition contrast. An alternative explanation of savings is suggested wherein relearning assists retrieval of information, thereby affecting recall in particular. We all know stories about people who believe they have entirely forgotten some event or skill, and then readily recover it when given the opportunity to learn it again. A woman spoke French as a young child in prewar Belgium but has had no exposure to the language since moving to the United States and claims no familiarity with the language as an adult. Over 40 years later, she visits Paris and finds to her surprise that she picks up the language with apparent ease. A man memorized Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in elementary school but has no recollection of having done so when his child shows the poem to him 30 years later. In helping the child to memorize the poem, however, the father learns it again quickly, perhaps never even recognizing why. Such anecdotes abound. The general conclusion is that relearning is faster and easier than original learning. Ebbinghaus (1885) called this relearning advantage savings, presumably because the partial information still "saved" in memory was what assisted learning on the next encounter. Interestingly, in line with the foregoing illustrations, this savings advantage can even occur without awareness many years after the original learning (Burtt, 1932, 1941; Titchener, 1923). Without question, the savings effect is a powerful one. Un-This research was supported by Grants A7459 and E6532 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by funds provided by the University of Toronto. The original article was prepared while the author was on study leave at the University of Queensland. For collecting the data, my thanks go to Deborah Paes (Experiment 1), Geoffrey Lowrie (Experiment 2), and P. J. Lootsteen (Experiments 3, 4, and 5). I also thank Barbara Tversky and Endel Tulving for providing the materials for Experiments 3 and 4, respectively. I am grateful to Bert Forrin, Sam Glucksberg, Tom Nelson, Henry Roediger, Dan Schacter, Marilyn Smith, Gay Snodgrass, the members of Endel Tulving's research group,...

Recovery of Unrehearsed Items in Connectionist Models

“…Bahrick, 1967;Bahrick & Bahrick, 1964;Bahrick & H all, 1991;Bahrick & Phelps, 1988;Groninger & G roninger, 1980;M acLeod, 1976M acLeod, , 1988M arm urek & Grant, 1990;N elson, 1971, 1978, 1985N elson et al, 1979, 1984. Given that m ost m odels of long-term m emor y can explain this result using a sim ilar m echanism to that outlined by Ebbinghaus (H etherington & Seidenberg, 1989;M cRae & Hetherington, 1993), it has not been necessar y to examine relearning m ore closely.…”

Latent memory for sensitization in Aplysia

“…This phenomenon is widely observed in diverse animals (Matzel et al 1992;Monk et al 1996;Medina et al 2001;Nicholson et al 2003), including man (Ebbinghaus 1885(Ebbinghaus /1913Nelson 1971Nelson , 1978MacLeod 1988). Thus it is generally accepted in many systems that a memory can outlast its behavioral expression.…”

“…A notable extension of this idea is "latent learning," which refers to the well established phenomenon that latent memory can develop in the absence of apparent original learning (Tolman and Honzik 1930). Following these early seminal studies, various forms of savings and latent learning have been described in a large variety of animals, including humans (Lubow and Moore 1959;Nelson 1971;Plotkin and Oakley 1975;Nelson 1978;MacLeod 1988;Matzel et al 1992;Lubow and Gewirtz 1995;Monk et al 1996;Medina et al 2001;Nicholson et al 2003). Collectively these studies show that the general phenomenon of latent memory is a common feature of learning and memory across the animal kingdom.…”

Regulating Access to Adult Content (with Privacy Preservation)

“…Unlike recognition, recall requires provision of a lexical label from someone who is being cued by an image. There is evidence that people can label images they have seen before [8,26]. Unfortunately, the labels are essentially proper nouns, and these are seldom descriptive, that can cause the memorial link between the name and the object to disappear or weaken over time [5].…”