What is forgetting and why do we forget important things?

Inspecting the limits of memory and the psychological function of forgetting.

What did you have for dinner last night? When was the last time you cried? What did you do on the morning of April 15, 2008? How did you celebrate your third birthday? You probably didn't know the answers to all these questions. What is the reason for this type of forgetfulness?

Let's look at the neuropsychological mechanisms that explain this phenomenon.

What is forgetfulness?

Memories are not permanent, since they are held in a continuously changing tissue in which some neurons die and certain connections change or weaken. This means not only that we may lose the accessibility of stored information, but also its availability in our cognitive system.

What is the difference between the two concepts? According to Endel Tulving, accessibility refers to the ease with which a stored memory can be retrieved at a given time, whereas availability refers to the presence or absence of a trace in the memory store.

Thus, an experience may appear to be lost in its entirety only because an adequate retrieval cue evoking the memory has not been presented. This would imply an inaccessibility of the information at the time of retrieval, but not necessarily a loss of availability, so that it could be retrieved at another time.

Types of forgetting

According to studies on memory, two types of forgetting can be distinguished: intentional forgetting and incidental forgetting.. The former involves processes or behaviors that intentionally diminish accessibility for some purpose, while the latter occurs without the intention of forgetting. This article will focus on the latter, showing some factors that promote and diminish it.

Factors that promote incidental forgetfulness

Now, what are the factors that influence when we simply forget some relevant information?

1. Passage of time

The forgetting curve (described by Ebbinghaus), shows a logarithmic decrease in memory retention as a function of elapsed time (known as memory decay). (known as trace decay). That is, as time passes we remember less information.

However, it is impossible to control factors such as recall review or the storage of new experiences, which generates interference, and it is difficult to demonstrate empirically the effect of time per se.

Other factors to be taken into account are context fluctuations and interference.

Context fluctuations

When the incidental context of retrieval does not correspond to the context present during encoding, forgetting is more likely.is more likely to be forgotten. With the passage of time, contextual changes are, in general, greater, since the world changes and so do we. An example is the case of infantile amnesia, which refers to the difficulty most people have in remembering the first years of life.

One possible cause is that children experience things very differently from the adults they become, things seem relatively bigger in childhood. (However, the maturational process they are in has to be taken into account, as they have not yet developed their brains like an adult).

3. Interference

Interference refers to the difficulty in retrieving similar stored traces. We are able to remember more easily and for a longer period of time experiences that are unique and easily differentiated. Therefore, sticking to routines makes life less memorable, sticking to routines makes life less memorable..

Interference becomes greater when the key that allowed access to the object memory trace is associated with additional memories, because several items compete with the goal of accessing consciousness (competition assumption). That is, if we store information similar to the consolidated one, it is more difficult to access it. For example, the memory of a summer. We will remember more easily the year we visited our neighbor's town (unique experience) than the summer we went to ours, since in the second case, as we go every year, it will be difficult to discern what happened specifically in each one.

4. Presentation of part of the keys to the whole

When part of a set of items is presented, the ability to recall the remaining items in the group is weakened.

This is due to the exposure to one or more competing itemsThis is due to exposure to one or more competing items, which aggravates the problems we encounter in retrieving a given target memory. The logic, following the interference situation described above, is as follows: if the presentation of some items in the set strengthens the association of those items with the cue, the strengthened items will produce greater competition during retrieval of the non-presented items and impair recall.

For example, when we do not remember a word (it is "on the tip of our tongue"), it is not beneficial to be offered a large list of terms by our acquaintances, as it will promote the accessibility of the terms, but not the word in question.

5. Retrieval

A paradoxical feature of human memory is that the very act of remembering causes forgetting. Intentional recall of an experience produces an effect on memory.

If memories are periodically retrieved, their resistance to forgetting is increased.. However, we must be cautious about what is being recalled, because if we recall the experience several times, we may be evoking the memory of what we have previously recalled (with its own context and details), and not the original situation.

This implies that the more often we retrieve an experience, the more retrieval events will exist in our memory. As long as the information retrieved is increasingly accurate and complete, the process will improve recall. However, if memories are incomplete or inaccurate (due to interference made during attempts to reconstruct the event), what we remember may not be what originally happened.

For example, by selectively reviewing only a few topics that go into an exam (due to lack of time), the unreviewed material will be impaired, especially if it is related to the reviewed one.

What factors curb incidental forgetting?

Jost's Law says that if two memories are equally strong at a given time, the older one will be more durable and will be forgotten more slowly. Thus, it is widely accepted that, in principle, new traces are more vulnerable until they gradually become engraved in memory through the process of consolidation. through the process of consolidation.

Types of consolidation

There are two types of consolidation: synaptic consolidation and systematic consolidation.. The first shows that the imprint of the experience needs time to consolidate (hours/days...) because it requires structural changes in the synaptic connections between neurons. Thus, until they have occurred, the memory is vulnerable.

The second holds that the hippocampus is necessary for memory storage and subsequent retrieval (as it constantly reactivates the brain areas involved in the initial experience), but its contribution decreases over time until the time when the cortex itself is able to retrieve the information. Until the memory becomes independent of the hippocampus, it is more vulnerable to forgetting.

Bibliographical references:

• Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. (2010). Memory. Alliance.