Forgetting Research Articles

The Importance of Temporal Distinctiveness for Forgetting Over the Short Term

Rapidly forgetting information once attention is diverted seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon. The cause of this rapid decline has been debated for decades; some researchers claim that memory traces decay as a function of time out of the focus of attention, whereas others claim that prior memory traces cause confusability by interfering with the current trace. Here we demonstrate that performance after a long delay can be better than performance after a short delay if the temporal confusability between the current item and previous items is reduced. These results provide strong evidence for the importance of temporal confusability, rather than decay, as the cause of forgetting over the short term.

Forgetful?

Forgetful?

Faster forgetting contributes to impaired spatial memory in the PDAPP mouse: Deficit in memory retrieval associated with increased sensitivity to interference?

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the possibility of faster forgetting by PDAPP mice (a well-established model of Alzheimer's disease as reported by Games and colleagues in an earlier paper). Experiment 1, using mice aged 13-16 mo, confirmed the presence of a deficit in a spatial reference memory task in the water maze by hemizygous PDAPP mice relative to littermate controls. However, after overtraining to a criterion of equivalent navigational performance, a series of memory retention tests revealed faster forgetting in the PDAPP group. Very limited retraining was sufficient to reinstate good memory in both groups, indicating that their faster forgetting may be due to retrieval failure rather than trace decay. In Experiment 2, 6-mo-old PDAPP and controls were required to learn each of a series of spatial locations to criterion with their memory assessed 10 min after learning each location. No memory deficit was apparent in the PDAPP mice initially, but a deficit built up through the series of locations suggestive of increased sensitivity to interference. Faster forgetting and increased interference may each reflect a difficulty in accessing memory traces. This interpretation of one aspect of the cognitive deficit in human mutant APP mice has parallels to deficits observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease, further supporting the validity of transgenic models of the disease.

Calculus for the forgetful: how to understand more and memorize less

Calculus for the forgetful: how to understand more and memorize less

Clarifying the Debate Over Therapeutic Forgetting

Clarifying the Debate Over Therapeutic Forgetting

Walking with Angels in Giacometti and Beckett

What kind of knowledge is offered by art? This essay discusses Giacometti together with Beckett and Benjamin. Giacometti and Beckett are concerned with relations and their collapse: between persons, between memory and forgetting. Together, they prompt questions about the compatibility of space and time which, in Benjamin, show the difficulty of writing history without triumphalism.

Functional forgetting

Functional forgetting

A temporal ratio model of memory.

A model of memory retrieval is described. The model embodies 4 main claims: (a) temporal memory--traces of items are represented in memory partly in terms of their temporal distance from the present; (b) scale-similarity--similar mechanisms govern retrieval from memory over many different timescales; (c) local distinctiveness--performance on a range of memory tasks is determined by interference from near psychological neighbors; and (d) interference-based forgetting--all memory loss is due to interference and not trace decay. The model is applied to data on free recall and serial recall. The account emphasizes qualitative similarity in the retrieval principles involved in memory performance at all timescales, contrary to models that emphasize distinctions between short-term and long-term memory.

The Subject Supposed to Be a Christian: On Paul Ricœur’s Memory, History, Forgetting

In this essay Badiou critiques Paul Ricœur’s work, Memory, History, Forgetting . He argues that Ricoeur’s theory of the subject cannot be understood without its Christian theological underpinnings, especially in terms of guilt, innocence and forgiveness. Translated by Natalie Doyle and Alberto Toscano.

Elements of a neurobiological theory of hippocampal function: the role of synaptic plasticity, synaptic tagging and schemas

The 2004 EJN Lecture was an attempt to lay out further aspects of a developing neurobiological theory of hippocampal function [Morris, R.G.M., Moser, E.I., Riedel, G., Martin, S.J., Sandin, J., Day, M. & O'Carroll, C. (2003) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci., 358, 773-786.] These are that (i) activity-dependent synaptic plasticity plays a key role in the automatic encoding and initial storage of attended experience; (ii) the persistence of hippocampal synaptic potentiation over time can be influenced by other independent neural events happening closely in time, an idea with behavioural implications for memory; and (iii) that systems-level consolidation of memory traces within neocortex is guided both by hippocampal traces that have been subject to cellular consolidation and by the presence of organized schema in neocortex into which relevant newly encoded information might be stored. Hippocampal memory is associative and, to study it more effectively than with previous paradigms, a new learning task is described which is unusual in requiring the incidental encoding of flavour-place paired associates, with the readout of successful storage being successful recall of a place given the flavour with which it was paired. NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity is shown to be critical for the encoding and intermediate storage of memory traces in this task, while AMPA receptor-mediated fast synaptic transmission is necessary for memory retrieval. Typically, these rapidly encoded traces decay quite rapidly over time. Synaptic potentiation also decays rapidly, but can be rendered more persistent by a process of cellular consolidation in which synaptic tagging and capture play a key part in determining whether or not it will be persistent. Synaptic tags set at the time of an event, even many trivial events, can capture the products of the synthesis of plasticity proteins set in train by events before, during or even after an event to be remembered. Tag-protein interactions stabilize synaptic potentiation and, by implication, memory. The behavioural implications of tagging are explored. Finally, using a different protocol for flavour-place paired associate learning, it is shown that rats can develop a spatial schema which represents the relative locations of several different flavours of food hidden at places within a familiar space. This schema is learned gradually but, once acquired, enables new paired associates to be encoded and stored in one trial. Their incorporation into the schema prevents rapid forgetting and suggests that schema play a key and hitherto unappreciated role in systems-level memory consolidation. The elements of what may eventually mature into a more formal neurobiological theory of hippocampal memory are laid out as specific propositions with detailed conceptual discussion and reference to recent data.

Forgetfulness Must: Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This is the text of a talk given at a conference on ‘Politics and Filiation’, held at the Manhattan Campus of the State University of New York Stonybrook in November 2002 and sponsored by the College International de Philosophie in Paris. The respondent was Jacques Derrida. It builds on analyses of Blanchot, Derrida and Levinas given in my earlier work, see in particular the final chapter of Ethics‐Politics‐Subjectivity (London and New York, Verso, 1999). 1. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994). For references to Blanchot, see pp. 55, 56–57, 73, 89, 100, 219, 234, 295/46, 46–47, 55, 70, 82, 194, 207 and 264. 2. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Politics of Friendship’, The Journal of Philosophy, 85:11 (November 1988), pp. 632–644 (pp. 643–44). These passages are an abbreviated version of some of the closing pages of Chapter 10 of Politiques de l'amitié, cf. pp. 322–29, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 290–96. 3. Dionys Mascolo, A la recherche d'un communisme de pensée (Paris: Editions Fourbis, 1993); and Maurice Blanchot, Pour l'amitié (Paris: Editions Fourbis, 1996). Translations are my own. 4. Maurice Blanchot, Pour l'amitié, pp. 31–34. 5. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, Part II, pp. 46–47. 6. J. Hoffmeister, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Hamburg: Philosophische Bibliothek, 1955), p. 238; and Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Band 4, p. 683. See also in this regard a helpful article by Erich Heintel, ‘Vom Sinn der Freundschaft’, in Von der Notwendigkeit der Philosophie in der Gegenwart, ed. H. Kohlenberger and W. Lütterfelds (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1976), pp. 190–221; see especially pp. 192–93 and 199–200. 7. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 316/ p. 284. Nietzsche's words are also cited towards the end of the original English version of ‘The Politics of Friendship’, p. 643. 8. It would be necessary to read Blanchot's remarks on 1968 together with La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983), a text itself mentioned by Derrida in a series of footnotes to Politiques de l'amitié, pp. 56–57, 89/ p. 46–47 and 70; and see especially p. 337, fn.1./ p. 304, n.32. 9. Maurice Blanchot, Pour l'amitié, p. 31. 10. Maurice Blanchot, Pour l'amitié, p. 9. 11. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 14/ p.x. 12. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 328/ p. 295. 13. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 324/ p. 291. 14. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 20 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), XI, p. 267. 15. Maurice Blanchot, L'amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 330. 16. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 328/ p. 295. 17. Maurice Blanchot, Pour l'amitié, pp. 33–34. 18. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 322/ p. 290. 19. Maurice Blanchot, Pour L'amitié, p. 34. 20. Maurice Blanchot, Pour L'amitié, p. 33. 21. Maurice Blanchot, Pour L'amitié p. 35. 22. On this question, see above Chapters 8 and 9. 23. Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), p. 52, n.2 24. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 87. 25. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 88/ 69. 26. Maurice Blanchot, L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 70–105. 27. Maurice Blanchot, L'entretien infini, pp. 100–101. 28. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961), p. 62; Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 89. Cited in Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilée, 1993), p. 48. See also ‘The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’’, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D. G. Carlson, eds, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 22. 29. I refer to Hent De Vries's paper given at a conference on Politiques de l'amitié held in Tilburg in 1997. 30. For the Derrida quote, see ‘The Politics of Friendship’, p. 643. Derrida uses the same formulation to describe Blanchot in Politiques de l'amitié, pp. 322/290. 31. Maurice Blanchot, ‘L'amitié’, in L'amitié, p. 328; Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 327/ 294. 32. Maurice Blanchot, ‘L'amitié’, p. 328. 33. Maurice Blanchot, ‘L'amitié’, p. 329. 34. Maurice Blanchot, ‘L'amitie’, p. 329.

Using written material to support recall of orthodontic information: a comparison of three methods.

The objective was to determine the effect of three different methods of presenting information on the recall of information in orthodontic patients in the short and long term. Thirty orthodontic patients at the commencement of their treatment were allocated randomly to groups receiving supporting written information in one of the three formats: mind map, acronym, and information leaflet. Short-term retention was assessed by administration of a nine-item questionnaire 10 to 15 minutes after receiving the information, and long-term retention was assessed after six weeks by repeating the same questionnaire without repetition of the information. Correct answers to the questions were compared across the three groups at short-term recall and long-term recall. A total knowledge score was determined by summing the number of correct answers across all nine items, and an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted to determine the effect of the method of information on long-term retention of the information. There were significant differences in recall between the three methods of presentation at both time 1 and time 2 (Fshort-term = 5.97, P < .01; Flong-term = 3.19, P < .05). Participants who were given a written information leaflet recalled less information on both occasions of testing. ANCOVA revealed that the three methods did not differ in the rate of forgetting of the material (F = 1.96, nonsignificant). Mind maps and acronyms convey a small but significant advantage in patient recall of information over written information leaflets.

Preface: War and Forgetfulness

Bien que les Americains se considerent a priori comme un peuple pacifique, la recurrence de leur engagement dans des conflits armes n’a cesse, tout au long de leur histoire, de les surprendre. Cette attitude reflete les circonstances de la vie politique americaine mais surtout le constat paradoxal que les Etats-Unis sont un empire d’anti-imperialistes. Si les sentiments des Americains recommandent la paix, la definition generale de leurs interets dicte la guerre.

Oscillatory EEG Correlates of Episodic Trace Decay

Recent studies suggest that human theta oscillations appear to be functionally associated with memory processes. It is less clear, however, to what type of memory sub-processes theta is related. Using a continuous word recognition task with different repetition lags, we investigate whether theta reflects the strength of an episodic memory trace or general processing demands, such as task difficulty. The results favor the episodic trace decay hypothesis and show that during the access of an episodic trace in a time window of approximately 200-400 ms, theta power decreases with increasing lag (between the first and second presentation of an item). LORETA source localization of this early theta lag effect indicates that parietal regions are involved in episodic trace processing, whereas right frontal regions may guide the process of retrieval. We conclude that episodic encoding can be characterized by two different stages: traces are first processed at parietal sites at approximately 300 ms, then further processing takes place in regions of the medial temporal lobe at approximately 500 ms. Only the first stage is related to theta, whereas the second is reflected by a slow wave with a frequency of approximately 2.5 Hz.

Is spoken duration a sufficient explanation of the word length effect?

The word length effect is one of the cornerstones of trace decay plus rehearsal models (TDR) of memory. Words of long spoken duration take longer to rehearse than words of short spoken duration and as such suffer more decay and are thus less well recalled. The current experiment manipulates both syllable length and spoken duration within words of fixed syllable length in an aim to test the assumptions of the TDR model. Our procedures produced robust effects of both syllable length and spoken duration in four measures of the time it takes to pronounce the different types of words. Serial recall for the same materials produced robust syllable effects, but no duration effects.

A memory span of one? Object identification in 6.5-month-old infants

Infants' abilities to identify objects based on their perceptual features develop gradually during the first year and possibly beyond. Earlier we reported [Káldy, Z., & Leslie, A. M. (2003). Identification of objects in 9-month-old infants: Integrating ‘what’ and ‘where’ information. Developmental Science, 6, 360–373] that infants at 9 months of age are able to use shape information to identify two objects and follow their spatiotemporal trajectories behind occlusion. On the other hand, another recent study suggests that infants at 4–5 months of age cannot identify objects by features and bind them to locations [Mareschal, D., & Johnson, M. H. (2003). The “what” and “where” of object representations in infancy. Cognition, 88, 259–276]. In the current study, we investigated the developmental steps between these two benchmark ages by testing 6.5-month-old infants. Experiment 1 and 2 adapted the paradigm used in our previous studies with 9-month-olds that involves two objects hidden sequentially behind separate occluders. This technique allows us to address object identification and to examine whether only one or both object identities are being tracked. Results of experiment 1 showed that 6.5-month-old infants could identify at least one of two objects based on shape and experiment 2 found that this ability holds for only one, the last object hidden. We propose that at this age, infants' working memory capacity is limited to one occluded object if there is a second intervening hiding. If their attention is distracted by an intervening object during the memory maintenance period, the memory of the first object identity appears to be lost. Results of experiment 3 supported this hypothesis with a simpler one-screen setup. Finally, results of experiment 4 show that temporal decay of the memory trace (without an intervening hiding) by itself cannot explain the observed pattern of results. Taken together, our findings suggest that at six months of age infants can store but a single object representation with bound shape information, most likely in the ventral stream. The memory span of one may be due to immaturity of the neural structures underlying working memory such that intervening items overwrite the existing storage.

Impairing Forgetting by Preventing New Learning and Memory.

Two causes of forgetting have been promulgated: memory trace decay and retroactive interference. The authors show that forgetting is an active process requiring both new learning and memory. In the present (1)Lymnaea model system, prevention of new learning of a conflicting association, inhibition of memory consolidation, or Right Pedal Dorsal 1 soma ablation, which blocks LTM formation, are all potent means to prevent forgetting. Thus procedures that alter the ability to learn or form memory of a new conflicting aerial respiratory association prevent forgetting of a learned associative behavior. These results are the 1st demonstration in any model system that forgetting requires the soma of a single neuron.

PABLO NERUDA: LO LÍRICO COMO REFLEJO DEL INDIVIDUO SUFRIENTE EN BÚSQUEDA CONSTANTE DEL MISTERIO CREADOR

Pablo Neruda's poetry stands out in the literature of the XX century. In particular, the poem A Song of Despair plus two other poems from the poet's ‘Residence on Earth are analysed here, Poetic Art and There is no Forgetful ness (sonnets). Through a partial stylistic study of these three poems, we make a critical version of the Poetics of the Chilean from the observation of the self reflecting the intimate conflicts of a unique soul

From the editor: remembering (Rwanda) and forgetting (Sudan)

From the editor: remembering (Rwanda) and forgetting (Sudan)

Forgetful and memorious landscapes

Forgetful and memorious landscapes