Conditioning, remembering, and forgetting.

Abstract

Theories of learning and of memory have been artificially separated for many years. In this article it is argued that the separation should be abandoned. Remembering and forgetting play an important role in simple conditioning experiments. For example, conditioned performance can readily recover after extinction because extinction is susceptible to forgetting. Memory itself involves the kind of associative learning that conditioning experiments are designed to investigate (e.g., conditioning experiments provide insight into the mechanisms of memory retrieval). Learning, remembering, and forgetting all occur within the same biological context; their adaptive functions are therefore intertwined. Then together, they shed light on some of the mechanisms of clinical relapse