The Forgetting

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Anderson JR, Schooler LJ (1991) Reflections of the environment in memory. Psychological Science 2: 396–408. How to Use the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve with Spaced Learning What is the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve?

Rubin DC, Hinton S, Wenzel AE (1999) The precise time course of retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 25: 1161–1176. Nelson TO (1985) Ebbinghaus's contribution to the measurement of retention: Savings during relearning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 11: 472–479. pmid:3160812 A study by Goodwin et al. (1969) investigated the effect of alcohol on state-dependent retrieval. They found that when people encoded information when drunk, they were more likely to recall it in the same state. For example, when they hid money and alcohol when drunk, they were unlikely to find them when sober.During the learning phase, the subject had a continuous choice to either read or reproduce the syllables. Towards the end of the learning process, occasional attempts were made to produce an entire row by heart. When there was a moment of hesitation during such ‘blind’ reproduction, the rest of the list was read (i.e., not blind) to the end. Blind reproduction always started with the first syllable of a row. Rows were not learned in parts. Each time the 13 th syllable had been reached and the row still contained errors, it was read again from the beginning. After having learned one row and before starting the next one, there was an interval of 15 sec. The interval served as a moment of rest and pause. All of this was aimed at following Ebbinghaus as closely as possible. Each row was thus learned to a 100% correct criterion before moving to learning the next row. For example, if someone tells you a joke on Saturday night after a few drinks, you”ll be more likely to remember it when you”re in a similar state – at a later date after a few more drinks. Stone cold sober on Monday morning, you”ll be more likely to forget the joke. So the primacy effect reflects items that are available for recall from long-term memory. However, words in the middle of the list used to be in short term memory until they were pushed out – or displaced by the words at the end of the list. Evaluation

Myung IJ, Kim C, Pitt MA (2000) Toward an explanation of the power law artifact: Insights from response surface analysis. Memory & Cognition 28: 832–840. The only independent variable in this experiment was the time-interval, which started at the end of learning a list for the first time. The time-interval ended at the beginning of learning a list for the second time. The time-intervals between learning and relearning were the same as Ebbinghaus [ 8]: 20 minutes, 1 hour, 9 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 6 days and 31 days. For each time interval, 10 lists were learned and relearned (for the 9 hour interval only 9 lists were learned due to unforeseen circumstances). Pashler, Harold; Rohrer, Doug; Cepeda, Nicholas J.; Carpenter, Shana K. (2007-04-01). "Enhancing learning and retarding forgetting: Choices and consequences". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 14 (2): 187–193. doi: 10.3758/BF03194050. ISSN 1069-9384. PMID 17694899. Nelson TO (1971) Savings and forgetting from long-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10: 568–576.

Forgetting - Key takeaways

Trace decay theory states that forgetting occurs as a result of the automatic decay or fading of the memory trace. Trace decay theory focuses on time and the limited duration of short-term memory. Murre JMJ, Meeter M, Chessa AG (2007) Modeling amnesia: Connectionist and mathematical approaches. In: Wenger MJ, Schuster C, editors. Statistical and Process Models for Neuroscience and Aging. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 119–162.