Factors Leading to Forgetting

Meaning     

Literary meaning – Fails to remember   

Meaning in psychological parlance – Inability to recall stored information into the present state of mind.

Definition

      According to Bhatia (2009), “Forgetting is the failure of the individual to revive in consciousness an idea or group of ideas without the help of the original stimuli”.

         According to Drever (1952),  “Forgetting means failure at any time to recall experience, when attempting to do so, or to perform an action previously learnt”.

Introduction

         

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913) pioneered the study of ‘forgetting’. He created nonsense syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant) (meaningless words) to test his memory. Out of his experiments on himself he drew a curve which is famously called as ‘Forgetting Curve’.

Factors Leading to Forgetting

          Forgetting is not caused by an individual factor rather it is the handiwork of collective effort of several factors.

(i)       Psychological factors

(ii)      Biological factors

(iii)     Social factors

(iv)     Factors related to nature of Information

(v)      Environmental factors

(i)       Psychological factors – Most of the forgetting occurs due to psychological factors. The forgetting that occurs due to psychological factors is termed as Psychological Amnesia. These are: -

          -         Encoding failure

          -         Storage failure

          -         Motivational forgetting (Suppression is conscious form of forgetting while Repression is unconscious form)

          -         Dearth of adequate cognitive processing, attention, focus

          -         Disuse

          -         Lack & Delay in rehearsal

          -         Interference

          -         Improper or lack of consolidation

          -         Lack of context

(ii)      Biological factors – Memory is subdomain of cognitive system which is maintained and managed by neural networks. The obstruction of any type in these neural networks can leads to forgetting. The obstructions can be of following types: -

          -         Damage due to injury

          -         Damage due to infection or disease

          -         Obstruction due to mental health issues

          -         Damage due to drug overdose

          -         Damage due to trauma

          -         Natural decay due to aging

          -         Lack of physical activity and diet

(iii)     Social factors – Forgetting is opposite to memory where memory is social process and social interaction influences memory (Barber & Mather, 2013). Therefore, social factors also facilitate forgetting.

          -         level of interpersonal relations

          -         level of social interaction

          -         interaction and gender (interaction with same gender facilitate forgetting      while with different gender inhibits forgetting (Barber  & Mathra, 2013).

          -         Collective forgetting

(iv)     Factors related to nature of Information – The nature of information learned also influences forgetting. The meaningful items are likely to be remembered longer than the meaningless information.

          -         Information of non-interest

          -         Information learned forcefully

          -         Meaninglessness of information

          -         Novelty of information

          -         Emotion provoking ability of information

          -         Autobiographical Information

          -         Level of abstractness in information

          -         Style of presentation of information [written, spoken, sung etc.]

(v)      Environmental factors – The forgetting is also influenced by the factors of immediate environment [physical surroundings].

          -         External context such as place, smell, situations, sound etc.

          -         Shifting of physical locations (Radvansky et al. 2010)

References:

1.       NCERT, XI Psychology Text book.

2.       Beiner, Guy (2018). Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular    Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198749356.

3.       Brown, J. (1958). Some tests of the decay theory of immediate memory.           Quarterly Journal of Experimental psychology, 10, 12-21.

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