Is Forgetting Caused by Inhibition?

Abstract

A well-known finding in memory research is the forgetting effect that occurs because of practicing some Item A on the recall of a related Item B. The traditional explanation for such interference effects is based on the notion of competition. According to the inhibition theory of forgetting, however, such forgetting is due to an inhibitory control process that operates whenever the retrieval of specific target information is hindered by competition from related information. The suppression of the related information is a longer lasting phenomenon that may show up on later testing. We report several experiments that were carried out to test 2 fundamental assumptions of the inhibition theory: the interference dependence and retrieval specificity assumptions. The results of these experiments do not support the predictions of the inhibition theory. Instead, the results are more compatible with the standard account that attributes the forgetting to competition at the time of the later testing.

Priming, not inhibition, of related concepts during future imagining

“…Participants tend to show greater forgetting of unpracticed-related items than unpracticed-unrelated items, which has been attributed to the suppression of unpracticed (yet competing) items during the retrieval-practice phase (Anderson et al, 1994). Although other interpretations of the RIF effect have been suggested (e.g., MacLeod, Dodd, Sheard, Wilson, & Bibi, 2003; Raaijmakers & Jakab, 2013), there is mounting evidence from converging methods which suggests that competition at retrieval is resolved by way of inhibition (e.g., Benoit & Anderson, 2012; Healey et al, 2010; Healey, Ngo, & Hasher, 2014; Hulbert, Henson, & Anderson, 2016; Rupprecht & Bäuml, 2016; Storm & Angello, 2010). Given that imagination involves the retrieval of information stored in memory, not all of it relevant to current goals, it is plausible that imagination would produce an inhibitory effect similar to that seen during memory retrieval.…”

“…If related concepts compete and are inhibited during future imagining, then participants should be slower to respond to these concepts on a subsequent task. By not re-presenting the same retrieval cues during imagination and test, this paradigm measures implicit access to the competing representations and is less susceptible to common criticisms of some variants of the RIF method (e.g., that RIF is due to interference from the strengthening of practiced associations or a change in context during the retrieval phase; Jonker, Seli, & MacLeod, 2013; Raaijmakers & Jakab, 2013). It also uses pre-existing, personally significant associations from participants’ own autobiographical memory and thus, more closely approximates the type of future thinking many investigators have typically studied in the literature discussed earlier that compares episodic remembering and future imagining (e.g., Addis, Musicaro, Pan, & Schacter, 2010; Addis, Pan, Vu, Laiser, & Schacter, 2009; Benoit, Szpunar, & Schacter, 2014).…”

Why does saccade execution increase episodic memory retrieval? A test of the top-down attentional control hypothesis

“…One is that subjects tend to retrieve Rp + items before Rp− items, which produces output interference (Smith, 1971). A second factor is often identified as inhibition of Rp− items (for a recent review, see Storm & Levy, 2012), but other possibilities exist (Raaijmakers & Jakab, 2013).…”

Retrieval-induced forgetting is associated with increased positivity when imagining the future

“…Up until this point, our discussion has largely assumed that inhibition underlies retrievalinduced forgetting and that individual differences in retrieval-induced forgetting reflect individual differences in the capacity to inhibit nontarget items in memory. Although there is good evidence to support this assumption (e.g., M. C. Anderson, 2003;Murayama et al, 2014;Storm & Levy, 2012), some researchers believe that retrievalinduced forgetting can be sufficiently explained by noninhibitory mechanisms, such as associative interference or inappropriate contextual cueing (see, e.g., Jonker, Seli, & MacLeod, 2013;Raaijmakers & Jakab, 2013;Verde, 2012). According to most noninhibitory accounts, retrieval-induced forgetting occurs because retrieval practice strengthens a subset of items, and it is this strengthening that blocks the accessibility of other, nonstrengthened items at test.…”