Abstract
The memory literature has identified interference and inhibition as two major sources of forgetting. While interference is generally considered to be a passive cause of forgetting arising from exposure to additional information that impedes subsequent recall of target information, inhibition concerns a more active and goal-directed cause of forgetting that can be achieved intentionally. Over the past 25 years, our knowledge of the neural mechanisms underlying both interference-induced and inhibition-induced forgetting has expanded substantially. The present paper gives a critical overview of this research, pointing out empirical gaps in the current work and providing suggestions for future studies.
Highlights
Since its inception in the late 19th century, memory research has attempted to identify the factors that lead to forgetting
Because the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been linked to interference detection and the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been linked to inhibition, the findings suggest that repeated retrieval practice may reduce demands on both interference detection and inhibition
For paired-associate learning, recursive reminding during encoding appears to constitute a factor that can modulate the magnitude of the interference effect
Summary
Since its inception in the late 19th century, memory research has attempted to identify the factors that lead to forgetting. Until the 1980s, the prevailing belief was that forgetting is primarily generated by passive or incidental environmental factors. One such factor is the length of the retention interval between study and test, with research showing that memory of previously studied target information often declines as the retention interval between study and test is increased [1]. Another prominent factor is interference, with studies showing that recall of previously studied information can suffer on a retention test when additional nontarget information has been encoded prior to the test [2,3].
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