Modality-specific forgetting

Abstract

A large body of literature agrees that accessing a target memory appears to trigger a difference-of-Gaussian memory activation pulse under which the target representation is activated and categorically flanking items are suppressed and forgotten. The nature of the underlying forgetting mechanism is far from settled, with support for several theories of forgetting. Here we argue the debate is partly fueled by different forgetting mechanisms underlying the forgetting of different memoranda. We capitalized on the unique aspect of the recognition-induced forgetting paradigm to test forgetting of both pictures and words in identical recognition-practice and restudy tasks. We found that memory for pictures and words followed different patterns of forgetting. Specifically, forgetting was retrieval specific for words, in that forgetting occurred only when words were recognized, and not when words were merely restudied. However, forgetting was not retrieval specific for pictures, in that forgetting occurred both when pictures were recognized as well as restudied. Further, patterns of forgetting operated along different category-level groupings for pictures and words. Words grouped along the superordinate level were susceptible to forgetting but pictures were not. The strength of this design is the ability to directly compare forgetting for different memoranda, establishing that patterns of forgetting are modality specific. These findings demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying forgetting may differ as a function of the particular memoranda, emphasizing the need for examining forgetting in long-term memory across modalities.

Recognition and rejection each induce forgetting

“…In the all-old condition, memory for practiced objects (0.64, 0.02) was significantly better than memory for baseline objects (0.48, 0.02), t(89) = 12.1, p < .001, BF = 3.2×10 17 , and memory for related objects (0.43, 0.02) was significantly worse than memory for baseline objects, t(89) = 3.7, p < .001, BF = 5.2×10 1 , demonstrating recognition-induced forgetting. These results replicate our existing evidence that restudy of pictures leads to forgetting (Maxcey, Janakiefski, et al, 2019b) and may be due to subjects engaging in a recognition task of the old objects despite instructions to restudy due to the visually distinct nature of the pictures. Regardless, the critical condition in Table 1.…”

“…This modified recognition-induced forgetting paradigm uniquely allowed us to separately measure the impact that recognition and rejection have on forgetting within subjects. If recognition of old objects leads to forgetting, then recognitioninduced forgetting will occur when all objects were old (Maxcey, Janakiefski, Megla, Smerdell, & Stallkamp, 2019b). If rejection of new objects leads to forgetting, then recognition-induced forgetting will occur when all items were new (Storm, Bjork, Bjork, & Nestojko, 2006).…”

Recognition-induced forgetting of schematically related pictures

“…Our inability to find recognition-induced forgetting for temporally (Maxcey et al, 2018) or schematically (Maxcey, Janakiefski, et al, 2019) grouped objects led us to conclude that recognition-induced forgetting does not operate over episodic memory (Maxcey et al, 2018). However, the following literature suggests that forgetting should operate over episodic memory (e.g., at the schematic level).…”

“…1 In other words, schematic knowledge involves the learned relationships between object categories, and taxonomic knowledge involves the hierarchical properties of a set of objects, with a superordinate category being at the top of the taxonomic hierarchy (Lewis, Poeppel, & Murphy, 2015;Mirman, Landrigan, & Britt, 2017). Despite the potentially distinct underlying neural mechanisms of perceptual and associative concepts (Mack & Palmeri, 2011Mareschal, Quinn, Lea, & Lea, 2010), studies investigating forgetting have largely ignored these categorical distinctions, including our own studies of recognition-induced forgetting 2 of pictures (but see Maxcey, Janakiefski, Megla, Smerdell, & Stallkamp, 2019). Recognition-induced forgetting is the forgetting of objects held in memory following the recognition of a target memory from the same object category (Maxcey & Woodman, 2014).…”

“…category in our previous work to broadly apply to both basicand subordinate-level categories. To generalize across these previous findings, we will use only the term basic-level category to describe the object relationships in the majority of our existing studies (Maxcey, 2016;Maxcey & Bostic, 2015;Maxcey, Bostic, & Maldonado, 2016;Maxcey, Janakiefski, et al, 2019;Maxcey & Woodman, 2014;Rugo, Tamler, Woodman, & Maxcey, 2017). Here we tested whether recognition-induced forgetting operates across schematically related 4 memories.…”