When Forgetting Is Good: Control Reductions at Retrieval

Wed, 06/13/2007 - 16:48 - NLN

What was your 6th birthday party like? If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting" of strongly competing memories is fundamental to memory retrieval. In a new article in Nature Neuroscience, Kuhl et al. provide neuroimaging evidence which ties retrieval-induced forgetting to activity in prefrontal cortex.

In the study, subjects studied a series of 240 word pairs, for example ATTIC-DUST, ATTIC-JUNK, or MOVIE-REEL. During the practice phase, subjects were given a cue word and the first letter of an associated word, and were asked to retrieve the rest of the associated word (e.g., ATTIC-D___). Critically, this practice phase included only some of the word pairs, such that half of the cue words were never practiced (e.g., MOVIE would not have been practiced) and half of the associates were never practiced (e.g., ATTIC-J___ would never have been practiced). Finally, in the testing phase, subjects were asked to recall all of the word pairs. All of this was performed within a fMRI scanner, allowing the authors to acquire spatially-precise measurements of the neural activity involved in study and retrieval.

Read full story in Developing Intelligence