active organisation of past reactions and past experiences’. Schemas refer to an organisation of past experiences and knowledge, which influence the way in which incoming information is interpreted, stored, and later retrieved. Memory, therefore, becomes an active process of construction where information is encoded and stored in terms of a person’s understanding and within her/his previous knowledge and expectations. N ATURE AND C AUSES OF F ORGETTING Each one of us has experienced forgetting and its consequences almost routinely.
Why do we forget? Is it because the information we commit to our long-term memory is somehow lost? Is it because we did not memorise it well enough? Is it because we did not encode the information correctly or is it because during storage, it got distorted or misplaced?
Many theories have been forwarded to explain forgetting and now you will read about those that seem plausible and have received considerable attention. The first systematic attempt to understand the nature of forgetting was made by Hermann Ebbinghaus, who memorised lists of nonsense syllables (CVC trigrams such as NOK or SEP decay due to disuse, then people who go to sleep after memorising should forget more compared to those who remain awake, simply because there is no way in which memory traces can be put to use during sleep. Results, however, show just the opposite. Those who remain awake after memorising (waking condition) show greater forgetting than those who sleep (sleeping condition).
Because trace decay theory did not explain forgetting adequately, it was soon replaced by another theory of forgetting which suggested that new information that enters the long-term memory interferes with the recall of earlier memories and therefore, interference is the main cause of forgetting. Forgetting due to Interference If forgetting is not due to trace decay then why does it take place? A theory of forgetting that has perhaps been the most influential one is the interference theory which suggests that forgetting is due to interference between various information that the memory store contains. This theory assumes that learning and memorising involve forming of associations between items and once