Forgetting and Remembering
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting and Intentional Forgetting
"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.” - Kazuo Ishiguro
One of the most common phrases that I hear in college is, “I learned that x semesters ago. How am I supposed to remember it now?” It troubles me on a personal level that many students forget information as soon as it stops being relevant to their immediate goal, their grades. I have always been a firm proponent of the idea that education should lead to life-long learning and long-term knowledge. To better understand what makes students forget and what helps them remember, I worked with psychology faculty on research in retrieval-induced forgetting and intentional forgetting. Retrieval-induced forgetting, the topic of the first and second paper, is forgetting of some information caused by remembering other information. Intentional forgetting, the subject of the third paper and the poster, is the process that people use to forget information that they have decided they do not need to remember anymore. My research in these fields has helped me understand that information needs to be salient, relevant, and remembered in connection to other memories in order to be remembered in the long-term.
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting and Semantic Relatedness