Speaker 7: Elizabeth L. Bjork
Saturday March 9, 09:20 - 10:20
Types and consequences of forgetting:
Intended and unintended
Elizabeth L. Bjork
Robert A. Bjork
Malcolm D. MacLeod
For most of us, -forgetting things- is the biggest complaint we have about our memories. Forgetting, however, is a necessary and critical component of any efficient and adaptive memory system and, often, exactly what we need to do to keep our memories functioning optimally in a changing world. We need some means to set aside, suppress, or erase old information, such as a phone number that is no longer functional, or a password that is out of date. Without some such forgetting mechanism, we would soon become either incapable of retrieving the information we now need, or very slow to do so owing to the need to invoke decision processes to disentangle information that is current from information that is out of date.
In certain cases, the types of forgetting that serve our broader purposes are intentional, or at least not unintentional, as when we try to avoid retrieving uncomfortable memories, or try to learn a new phone number or password. In many other cases, however, forgetting is unintended and often not consistent with our current goals. Our primary focus in this paper is on one such type of forgetting, retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994), in which retrieving some of the items associated to a particular cue or configuration of cues results in subsequent impaired access to (i.e., forgetting of) other items associated to that cue or those cues. We argue that retrieval-induced forgetting is prevalent in our lives and that it plays a significant role not only in the updating of our memories, but also----and sometimes unintendedin stereotyping and other forms of impression formation, in the reliability of witness memory, and---possibly---in repression.