Our Complex Memory System essays

Our Complex Memory System essays What did you do yesterday? What did you do on the same day a year ago? Ten years ago? It is highly probable that you cannot recall what you were doing on a specific date ten years you, you have forgotten. The phenomenon of forgetting is an important topic to investigate as it can give us a further understanding of how our memory systems work. A classic study was carried out by Ebbinghaus (1885) using himself as the subject and nonsense syllables as the material to be learned. He learned 169 lists of 13 nonsense syllables then relearned each list after an interval ranging from 21 minutes to 31 days. He always found that some forgetting had occurred and used the amount of time taken to a relearn the list as a measure of how much had been forgotten. Ebbinghauss results showed that forgetting is rapid at first but gradually slows down. The rate of forgetting is more logarithmic, whereas the relationship between learning and remembering is linear. What is it that causes us to forget? There are two traditional theories of forgetting. One argues that memory traces simply fade away over time, then second suggests that forgetting is the result other learning obscuring or interfering with memory traces. If the memory trace simply decays then the crucial factor in how much is forgotten should be much time has elapsed, the longer the delay, the less is recalled. If forgetting is due to interference however, the crucial factor would be the amount of events that occurred within that time, with more interfering events resulting in more forgetting. It is difficult to separate the importance of time from the importance of intervening events, but as shown in a study by Baddeley and Hitch (1977) it is possible. They asked football and rugby players to recall the names of the teams they had played previously in the season. It was the case that the majority of the players had missed some games and so for one player their game before last ma y have...