MEMORY

FORGETTING
• REPRESSION THEORY
• INTENTIONAL FORGETTING
 FORGETTING IN LONG TERM MEMORY

• According to Munn (1967) “forgetting is the loss, temporary

or permanent, of the ability to recall or recognise
something learnt earlier.”
• According to Drever (1952)” Forgetting means failure at
any time to recall an experience, when attempting to do so,
or to perform an action previously learnt.
 CAUSES OF FORGETTING

• Retrieval Failure
• Ineffective Coding
• Motivated Forgetting
• Physical injury
• Organic Causes
 REPRESSIO
N

• An unconscious process ( defense mechanism) through which an

individual blocks a memory of an event or experience from entering
conscious awareness because of the anxiety associated with recall;
said to be a type of motivated forgetting. Types of repression:
1. Primal repression
2. Repression Proper
 MECHANISM OF REPRESSION

• Retrieval Inhibition
• Motivated Forgetting
• State dependant Remembering
 CASE STUDY-THE JANE DOE CASE

• One case that has been presented as definitive proof of the reality of repressed
memories, recorded by psychiatrist David Corwin, involved a patient (the Jane
Doe) who, according to Corwin, had been seriously abused by her mother, had
recalled the abuse at age six during therapy with Corwin, then eleven years
later was unable to recall the abuse before memories of the abuse returned to
her mind again during therapy.  An investigation of the case by Elizabeth Loftus
 and Melvin Guyer, however, raised serious questions about many of the
central details of the case as reported by Corwin, including whether or not Jane
Doe was abused by her mother at all, suggesting that this may be a case of
false memory for childhood abuse with the memory "created" during
suggestive therapy at the time that Doe was six. Loftus and Guyer also found
evidence that, following her initial "recall" of the abuse during therapy at age
six, Doe had talked about the abuse during the eleven years in between the
sessions of therapy, indicating that even if abuse had really occurred, memory
 RETRIEVAL FAILURE THEORY

• An explanation of forgetting due to lack of or

failure to use the right cue to retrieve information
stored in memory; the information is not lost
forever but it simply cannot be retrieved at that
moment.
 TIP-OF-THE-TONGUE PHENOMENON

• The feeling of being aware of knowing something

and being confident that it will be remembered,
but unable to be retrieve the information at that
point in time. This phenomenon demonstrates
retrieval failure theory.
 MOTIVATED FORGETTING

• Motivated forgetting is a theorized psychological behavior

in which people may forget unwanted memories, either
consciously or unconsciously. There are two main classes of
motivated forgetting: psychological repression is an
unconscious act, while thought suppression is a conscious
form of excluding thoughts and memories from awareness.
 THOUGHT SUPPRESSION

• Thought suppression is referred to as the conscious and deliberate

efforts to curtail one's thoughts and memories. Suppression is goal-
directed and it includes conscious strategies to forget, such as
intentional context shifts. For example, if someone is thinking of
unpleasant thoughts, ideas that are inappropriate at the moment,
or images that may instigate unwanted behaviors, they may try to
think of anything else but the unwanted thought in order to push
the thought out of consciousness.
 INTENTIONAL FORGETTING

It is also known as the directed forgetting in which its

suppresses unpleasant memory of traumas. This paradigm
contains two methods-item method and list method. Also it
involves two theories:
1. Retrieval inhibition
2. Context shift