Abstract
Two experiments studied how the age at which words are acquired (Age of Acquisition, AoA) modulates forgetting. Experiment 1 employed the retrieval-practice paradigm to test the effect of AoA on the incidental forgetting that emerges after solving competition during retrieval (i.e., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). Standard RIF appeared with late-acquired words, but this effect disappeared with early-acquired words. Experiment 2 evaluated the effect of AoA on intentional forgetting by employing the list-method directed forgetting paradigm. Results showed a standard directed forgetting effect only when the to-be-forgotten words were late-acquired words. These findings point to the prominent role of AoA in forgetting processes.
Highlights
Skills and concepts learned during early childhood seem to have a special status in cognition
Experiment 1 revealed that while the standard retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect was observed with late-acquired words, there was no forgetting effect with early-acquired ones
This finding suggests that early-acquired representations, which are assumed to be strongly consolidated and overlearned, play a prominent role in cognition possibly because they are better interconnected and more efficiently represented in the memory system
Summary
Skills and concepts learned during early childhood seem to have a special status in cognition. Certain musical abilities, such as absolute pitch, can usually only be learnt during childhood [1], and concepts that are acquired early in life are processed faster than late-acquired ones [2,3]. Early-acquired words have been shown to be more resistant to cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease and other neuropsychological problems [7,8]. This advantage for early-acquired representations has been attributed, for example, to better connections in semantic memory [9,10]. It has been suggested that early-acquired words constitute the basis by which the mental network is organized. Once a mental configuration is created with these first representations, it losses plasticity so that later acquired representations are more difficult to integrate ([11], see [12,13,14] for a review and for alternative hypotheses)
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