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Each one of us has experienced forgetting and its consequences almost routinely. There | . are some reasons because of which we forget:
1. It is because the information we commit to our long term memory is somehow lost.
2. It is because we did not memorise it well enough.
3. It is because we did not encode the information correctly or it is because during storage, it got distorted or misplaced.
There are theories which have been developed to explain forgetting:
1. Theory of forgetting developed by Hermann Ebbinghaus:
According to him the rate of forgetting is maximum in the first nine hours,particularly during the first hour. After that, the rate slows down and not much is forgotten even after many days.
2. Forgetting due to Trace decay:
(a)Trace theory (also called disuse theory) is the earliest theory of forgetting.
(b)The assumption here is that memory leads to modification in the central nervous system, which is akin to physical changes in the brain called тАЬmemory tracesтАЭ. When these memory traces are not used for a long time, they simply fade away and become unavailable.
Drawbacks:
тАв If forgetting takes place because memory traces decay due to disuse, then people who go to sleep after memorizing should forget more compared to those who remain awake.
тАв Those who remain awake after memorizing show greater forgetting than those , who sleep.
3. Forgetting due to interference:
тАв The interference theory suggests that forgetting is due to interferences between various informations that the memory store contains.
тАв Interference comes about at a time of retrieval when these various sets of associations compete with each other for retrieval.
There are two kinds of interferences that may result in forgetting.
(a) Proactive (forward moving): Proactive means what you have learnt earlier interferes with the recall of your subsequent learning. In other words, in proactive interference past learning interferes with the recall of later learning, e.g. If you know English and you find it difficult to learn French it is because of proactive interference.
(b) Retroactive (backward moving): Retroactive refers to difficulty in recalling
what you have learnt earlier because of learning a new material. In retroactive interference the later learning interferes with the recall of past learning.e.g. If you cannot recall English equivalents of French words that you are currently memorizing then it is because of retroactive interference.
4. Forgetting due to retrieval failure:
тАв Forgetting can also occur because at the time of recall, either the retrieval cues are absent or they are inappropriate.
тАв Retrieval cues are aids which help us in recovering information stored in the memory.
тАв This view was advanced by тАЬTulving and his associatesтАЭ who carried out several experiments to show that recall of content become poor either due to absence or inappropriateness of retrieval cues that are available /employed at the time of recall.
тАв Without getting any cues one may recall a couple of them only but if the learner get cues like category names then the recall improves significantly.
Category names may act as retrieval cues.