Forgetting our facts: the role of inhibitory processes in the loss of propositional knowledge.
Seven experiments are reported that show that retrieving facts from long-term memory is accomplished, in part, by inhibitory processes that suppress interfering facts. When asked to repeatedly retrieve a recently learned proposition (e.g., recalling The actor is looking at the tulip, given cues such as Actor looking t__), subjects experienced a recall deficit for related facts (e.g., The actor is looking at the violin) on a recall test administered 15 min later. Importantly, this retrieval-induced forgetting was shown to generalize to other facts in which the inhibited concepts took part (e.g., The teacher is lifting the violin), replicating a finding observed by M. C. Anderson and B. A. Spellman (1995) with categorical stimuli. These findings suggest a critical role for suppression in models of propositional retrieval and implicate the mere retrieval of what we know as a source of forgetting of factual knowledge.
Anderson
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MC
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene 97403-1227, USA. mcanders@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Bell
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T
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014163:Transfer, Psychology; D014706:Verbal Learning