PSYCH 140M Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Interference Theory, Decay Theory, Psych
Document Summary
Forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time. Forgetting occurs because of competition with other material. Decay doesn"t account very well for forgetting from ltm. Passage of time not as influential as what happens during that time. Interference occurs when our memory of one piece of information impairs our ability to retrieve another. Interference especially like to occur when the items are similar to each other. We encode a lot of similar memories every day. We get more and more similar memory traces over time, resulting in more and more interference, and more and more impairment of retrieval. Interference occurs whenever the cue used to access a target becomes associated with additional memories. When we are then given that particular cue, there is a competition for access to conscious awareness between the target information and the other pieces of information that the cue is associated with (competitors)
