Dissociating memory accessibility and precision in forgetting

Forgetting involves the loss of information over time; however, we know little about what form this information loss takes. Do memories become less precise over time, or do they instead become less accessible? Here we assessed memory for word–location associations across four days, testing whether f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour 2020-08, Vol.4 (8), p.866-877
Main Authors: Berens, Sam C., Richards, Blake A., Horner, Aidan J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/1595/2167
631/378/1595/2638
631/378/1595/2639
631/477/2811
Access
Adolescent
Adult
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Experimental Psychology
Female
Humans
Life Sciences
Male
Memories
Memory
Memory Disorders
Mental Recall
Microeconomics
Models, Psychological
Neurosciences
Personality and Social Psychology
Registered Report
Retention, Psychology
Young Adult
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Summary:Forgetting involves the loss of information over time; however, we know little about what form this information loss takes. Do memories become less precise over time, or do they instead become less accessible? Here we assessed memory for word–location associations across four days, testing whether forgetting involves losses in precision versus accessibility and whether such losses are modulated by learning a generalizable pattern. We show that forgetting involves losses in memory accessibility with no changes in memory precision. When participants learned a set of related word–location associations that conformed to a general pattern, we saw a strong trade-off; accessibility was enhanced, whereas precision was reduced. However, this trade-off did not appear to be modulated by time or confer a long-term increase in the total amount of information maintained in memory. Our results place theoretical constraints on how models of forgetting and generalization account for time-dependent memory processes. Protocol registration The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 4 June 2019. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.4368464.v1 . In this Registered Report, Berens et al. demonstrate that forgetting predominantly involves losses in memory accessibility with little or no change in memory precision.
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-020-0888-8