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Query: UMLS:C0598853 (forgetting)
 3,232 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

To familiarize readers with the main issues in the debate over the veracity of long-hidden memories of childhood sexual abuse, information, arguments and hypotheses from the medical and social-science literature are examined. The author reviews the challenge presented by those who propose that all or most memories of past sexual abuse recovered during therapy are false, the response of those who contend that these memories are valid and could not be manufactured by therapists, and the views of those with a more balanced approach who carefully examine all of the evidence and look for the middle ground. Although research in this area is in its infancy, available information suggests that both recovered and fabricated memories exist. Until further research helps to identify the difference between the two, physicians need to keep an open mind and offer support and understanding to both alleged victims and accused parents. Research is needed on (1) the extent of corroboration of recovered memories of sexual abuse; (2) the identification of memory mechanisms, specific situations and personality factors involved in forgetting and remembering traumatic events; and (3) the factors affecting traumatized patients during therapy, including memory performance and suggestibility.
CMAJ 1996 Sep 15
PMID:The repressed memory controversy: is there middle ground? 914 45

Some years ago Underwood (1964) grappled with the problem of explaining his finding that rate of forgetting was not a function of the rate of learning but rather seemed to reflect the level of learning achieved. He likened different rates of learning to filling an Erlenmeyer flask of water at different rates and the process of forgetting to the rate of evaporation, which in turn is a function of the exposed surface area. Since an Erlenmeyer flask is cone-shaped, the surface area becomes smaller as the flask is filled, thus the greater the amount of learning achieved, or water added, the less the rate of evaporation independent of how quickly or slowly the flask was filled. I give this example because it is such a clear description of history kept simple, in the psychological process of learning and forgetting. Indeed it is as simple as Charles Dickens' description of how students are to be taught, that is, by considering them to be "little vessels...ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim" (Dickens, 1961, p. 12). The object of this paper is to show how our neglect in specifying the history of reinforcement and other behavior analytic concepts has resulted in our ceding much of our field to cognitive psychologists even though our knowledge of conditioning enables us to study it more thoroughly than they can.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry 1996 Sep
PMID:Reinforcement history: a concept underutilized in behavior analysts. 895 21

How aging affects the utilization of monitoring in the allocation of study time was investigated by having adults learn paired associates during multiple study-test trials. During each trial, a subject paced the presentation of individual items and later judged the likelihood of recalling each item on the upcoming test; after all items had been studied and judged, recall occurred. For both age groups in Study 1, (1) people's judgments were highly accurate at predicting recall and (2) intraindividual correlations between judgments (or recall) on one trial, and study times on the next trial were negative, which suggests that subjects utilized monitoring to allocate study time. However, the magnitude of these correlations was less for older than for younger adults. Study 2 revealed that these differences were not due to age differences in forgetting. Results from both studies suggest that older adults do not utilize on-line monitoring to allocate study to the same degree as younger adults do, and that these differences in allocation contribute to age deficits in recall.
Mem Cognit 1997 Sep
PMID:Age differences in the allocation of study time account for age differences in memory performance. 933 87

Recent studies of the mathematical relationship between time and forgetting suggest that it is a power function rather than an exponential function, a finding that has important theoretical consequences. Through computational analysis and reanalyses of published data, we demonstrate that arithmetic averaging of exponential curves can produce an artifactual power curve, particularly when there are large and systematic differences among the slopes of the component curves. A series of simulations showed that the amount of power artifact is small when the slopes of the component curves are normally or rectangularly distributed and when the performance measure is noise free. However, the simulations also showed that the artifact can be quite large, depending on the shape of the noise distribution and restrictions in the performance range. We conclude that claims concerning the form of memory functions should consider whether the data are likely to contain artifact caused by averaging or by the presence of range-restricted noise.
Mem Cognit 1997 Sep
PMID:Artifactual power curves in forgetting. 933 90

Wixted and Ebbesen (1991) showed that forgetting functions produced by a variety of procedures are often well described by the power function, at-b, where a and b are free parameters. However, all of their analyses were based on data arithmetically averaged over subjects. R. B. Anderson and Tweney (1997) argue that the power law of forgetting may be an artifact of arithmetically averaging individual subject forgetting functions that are truly exponential in form and that geometric averaging would avoid this potential problem. We agree that researchers should always be cognizant of the possibility of averaging artifacts, but we also show that our conclusions about the form of forgetting remain unchanged (and goodness-of-fit statistics are scarcely affected by) whether arithmetic or geometric averaging is used. In addition, an analysis of individual subject forgetting functions shows that they, too, are described much better by a power function than by an exponential.
Mem Cognit 1997 Sep
PMID:Genuine power curves in forgetting: a quantitative analysis of individual subject forgetting functions. 933 91

A modified way of administering the process dissociation procedure to the false fame paradigm is described. Multidimensional signal detection theory (SDT) is used to correct for recollection as well as familiarity false alarms, and two experiments are reported that compare this method of false alarm correction with the hybrid procedure preferred by Jacoby et al. (1993). In experiment 1, it is shown that recollection and familiarity are lost at the same rate in normal subjects over a delay of 1 d when an SDT analysis is used. Analysis with the hybrid procedure fails to find any forgetting over the 1-d delay. In experiment 2, amnesics are shown to have preserved familiarity in the face of impaired recollection for names when the results are analyzed by either method. An additional analysis showed that the amnesics' familiarity was normal even for relatively novel surnames. The SDT analysis also revealed that the amnesics, relative to controls, showed a conservative recollection and a liberal familiarity response bias. The results indicate that it is important to correct for recollection as well as familiarity false alarms.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc 1995 Sep
PMID:Assessment of familiarity and recollection in the false fame paradigm using a modified process dissociation procedure. 937 32

We examined the accounts of 27 survivors of the Marchioness ferry sinking, using cross-validation of accounts to search for instances of motivated forgetting. In order to identify objective items that could be validated, we focused the analysis on subjects' statements of whom they were with at various stages of the disaster. We compared these findings with an informal recall of a non-traumatic event after an interval of a few days. The main finding was that recall was reasonably good for both traumatic and non-traumatic events. Specifically, in the Marchioness sample, among those 86 statements that could have been confirmed in the accounts of other informants, 74 were in fact confirmed. Of the remaining 12 unconfirmed statements, only one involved a contradiction. We conclude that for a disaster of this kind, and with this particular sample of individuals, motivated forgetting was extremely rare.
Memory 1997 Sep
PMID:Memories for the Marchioness. 941 24

Memory performance was examined across consecutive tests in three directed-forgetting experiments. Following word-method or list-method cueing to forget, significant directed forgetting was observed for all tests: Free recall for remember cue words always exceeded free recall for forget cue words. Moreover, following either cueing method, similar magnitudes of hypermnesia (improved free recall across tests) and reminiscence (recovery of words across tests) were observed for both word types. Regardless of cueing method, after an initial free recall test, the level of recovery for both word types did not differ significantly. That is, directed forgetting was not observed for the reminiscence data. Taken together, the pattern of results suggest that cues to forget impair the encoding of information but, after an initial memory test, they do not interrupt the accessing of that information. These findings are consistent with the selective rehearsal account but not the retrieval inhibition account of directed forgetting.
Can J Exp Psychol 1997 Sep
PMID:Is there hypermnesia and reminiscence for information intentionally forgotten? 949 55

These experiments are the first to investigate children's encoding and use of information about a memory cue in Bjork's (1972) intentional forgetting task. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 and college students were given cues to either remember or forget after the presentation of each picture. Recall and recognition tests of pictures and cues followed. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1 except that the list of presentation pictures was altered for some children (Grades 3 and 4) and adolescents (Grades 8 and 9) so that remember and forget cues were associated with particular taxonomic categories. In Experiment 3, the testing component was modified so that children (Grades 2, 3, and 4) and college students were asked to recall only the cue associated with each picture. The results indicated that (1) children as young as second graders encode the cue associated with each picture, although to a lesser extent than do college students, (2) much improvement in intentional forgetting is still occurring during adolescence, (3) only adults adequately cluster their recall by cue, (4) associating remember and forget cues with items from different categories does not increase the differentiation between cues, and (5) eliminating picture recall and recognition has minimal effects on the magnitude of cue judgments. These results suggest that children's difficulties on intentional forgetting tasks stem, at least in part, from their poorer encoding of information about whether an item should be remembered or forgotten.
Mem Cognit 1998 Sep
PMID:Knowing what to remember and forget: a developmental study of cue memory in intentional forgetting. 979 22

Learning, making memories, and forgetting are thought to require changes in the strengths of connections between neurons. Such changes in synaptic strength occur in two phases: an early phase that is likely mediated by covalent modifications to existing proteins, and a delayed phase that depends on new gene expression and protein synthesis. However, the biochemical mechanisms by which neuronal activity leads to changes in synaptic strength are poorly understood. Recently, it has been shown that animals that lack Ras guanine nucleotide releasing factor (Ras-GRF), a Ca(2+)-dependent activator of the small GTP-binding protein, Ras, do not learn fear responses normally, although other types of learning appear normal. These animals show defects in the delayed phase of memory formation within the neuronal circuit that mediates fear conditioning. This paper suggests that Ras-GRF couples synaptic activity to the molecular mechanisms that consolidate changes in synaptic strength within specific neuronal circuits.
Bioessays 1998 Sep
PMID:To fear or not to fear: what was the question? A potential role for Ras-GRF in memory. 981 57


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