Forgetting: Inhibition or Interference?
Gino Camp · EUR Research Repository (Erasmus University Rotterdam) · 2001
Let\\xe2\\x80\\x99s suppose you are trying to remember the name of the professor that gave you \ a cognitive psychology class in your first year at university. This may turn out to be \ quite difficult, because you have had many other classes since then with diff erent \ professors. Th ere are different accounts of why this forgetting occurs. One explanation \ is that forgetting occurs because of interference when you are trying to retrieve the \ professor\\xe2\\x80\\x99s name. Because you have had classes by many other professors, the cue \ professor has been associated to many other names and faces. These names and \ faces can interfere when you are trying to remember the name of your cognitive \ psychology professor. Thus, according to interference accounts, forgetting is caused \ by the addition or strengthening of competing items in memory (e.g., McGeoch, \ 1932, 1942; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981; Mensink & Raaijmakers, 1988). \ \ A second account of why you are unable to remember the name of your old \ professor is inhibition. Over the years, there have probably been many occasions \ on which you retrieved the names of professors of more recent classes. During these \ retrieval attempts, the name of your old professor may have been activated and this \ may have given rise to retrieval competition. Because your old professor was not the \ name you were looking for, the name of your old professor may have been inhibited \ to make the correct name more available. Because of this inhibition, the name of \ your old professor may have become more difficult to retrieve at a later time. Th us, \ according to inhibitory accounts, forgetting is caused by the active suppression of \ memory items when these memory items compete with the appropriate response \ (e.g., Anderson, 2003; Anderson & Spellman, 1995; Levy & Anderson, 2002). In this \ view, forgetting is not a passive consequence of adding new information to memory, \ but it is an active process. People can exert inhibitory control over the activation of \ memory traces.