Philosophy:Memory inhibition

From HandWiki
Revision as of 06:49, 5 February 2024 by Wikisleeper (talk | contribs) (update)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information. The scientific concept of memory inhibition should not be confused with everyday uses of the word "inhibition". Scientifically speaking, memory inhibition is a type of cognitive inhibition, which is the stopping or overriding of a mental process, in whole or in part, with or without intention.[1] Memory inhibition is a critical component of an effective memory system.[2] While some memories are retained for a lifetime, most memories are forgotten.[3] According to evolutionary psychologists, forgetting is adaptive because it facilitates selectivity of rapid, efficient recollection.[4] For example, a person trying to remember where they parked their car would not want to remember every place they have ever parked. In order to remember something, therefore, it is essential not only to activate the relevant information, but also to inhibit irrelevant information.

There are many memory phenomena that seem to involve inhibition, although there is often debate about the distinction between interference and inhibition.

History

In the early days of psychology, the concept of inhibition was prevalent and influential (e.g., Breese, 1899; Pillsbury, 1908; Wundt, 1902).[1] These psychologists applied the concept of inhibition (and interference) to early theories of learning and forgetting.[5] Starting in 1894, German scientists Muller and Shumann conducted empirical studies that demonstrated how learning a second list of items interfered with memory of the first list.[5] Based on these experiments, Muller argued that the process of attention was based on facilitation.[6] Arguing for a different explanation, Wundt (1902) claimed that selective attention was accomplished by the active inhibition of unattended information,[6] and that to attend to one of several simultaneous stimuli, the others had to be inhibited.[1] American Psychologist Walter Pillsbury combined Muller and Wundt's arguments, claiming that attention both facilitates information that is wanted and inhibits information that is unwanted.[6][7]

In the face of behaviorism during the late 1920s through the 1950s, and through the early growth of cognitive psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s,[8] inhibition largely disappeared as a theory.[1] Instead, classical interference theory dominated memory research until as late as 1960.[5] By the early 1970s, however, classical interference theory began to decline due to its reliance on associationism,[8] its inability to explain the facts of interference or how interference applies to everyday life, and to newly published reports on proactive and retroactive inhibition.[5]

Since the mid-1980s, there has been a renewed interest in understanding the role of inhibition in cognition.[6] Research on a wide variety of psychological processes, including attention, perception, learning and memory, psycholinguistics, cognitive development, aging, learning disabilities, and neuropsychology, suggests that resistance to interference (which implies capacity for inhibition) is an important part of cognition.[5]

More recently, researchers suggest that the hippocampus plays a role in the regulation of disliked and competing memories, and fMRI studies have shown hippocampus activity during inhibition processes.[9]

Empirical research

Part-set cuing effect

The "part-set cuing effect" was initially discovered by Slamecka (1968), who found that providing a portion of to-be-remembered items as test cues often impairs retrieval of the remaining un-cued items compared with performance in a no-cue (free-recall) control condition.[10] Such an effect is intriguing because normally cues are expected to aid recall (e.g., Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966).[11] A prominent figure in retrieval-based inhibition research, Henry L. Roediger III was another one of the first psychologists to propose the idea that retrieving an item reduces the subsequent accessibility of other stored items.[12] Becoming aware of the part-set cueing effect reduces the effect, such that relearning part of a set of previously learned associations can improve recall of the non-relearned associations.[13]

Hasher and Zacks' inhibition account of aging

Using inhibition to explain memory processes began with the work of Hasher and Zacks (1988), which focused on the cognitive costs associated with aging and bridging the attention-memory gap.[1] Hasher and Zacks found that older adults show impairments on tasks that require inhibiting irrelevant information in working memory, and these impairments may lead to problems in a variety of contexts.[14]

Retrieval-induced forgetting

Main page: Philosophy:Retrieval-induced forgetting

Anderson and Spellman's model of retrieval-induced forgetting suggests that when items compete during retrieval, an inhibitory process will serve to suppress those competitors. For instance, retrieval of one meaning for a word (e.g. the verb meaning of the word sock) will tend to inhibit the dominant meaning of that word (e.g. the noun meaning of sock).[15] In 1995, Anderson and Spellman conducted a three-phase study using their retrieval-induced forgetting model to demonstrate unlearning as inhibition.[16]

  • Study phase: Participants study a list of category-exemplar pairings where some exemplars are semantically similar in that they belong to another category besides the one they are explicitly paired with (e.g. Food-Cracker, Food-Strawberry, Red-Tomato, Red-Blood).
  • Retrieval-practice phase: Participants are cued to practice remembering some of the exemplars given the category cue (e.g. Red-Bl__).
  • Test phase: Given each category as a cue, the participant tries to recall the exemplar (e.g. Food-C__, Food-S__, Red-T__, Red-Bl__).

Anderson and Spellman observed that items that shared a semantic relationship with practiced information was less recallable. Using the example from above, recall of items related to practiced information, including tomato and strawberry was lower than recall for cracker, even though strawberry is part of a different pair. This finding suggests that associative competition by explicit category cue is not the only factor in retrieval difficulty. They theorized that the brain suppresses, or inhibits, non-practiced attributes.[1] This explains why an item that is very similar to tomato, but not from the same pair, also exhibits decreased recall rate.

"Think/no-think" paradigm and intentional inhibition

During the recovered memory debate of the 1990s, cognitive psychologists were dubious about whether specific memories could be repressed. One stumbling block was that repression had not been demonstrated in a research study. In 2001, researchers Anderson and Green claimed to have found laboratory evidence of suppression.[17] They trained their participants with a list of unrelated word pairs (such as ordeal-roach), so they could respond with the second member of the pair (roach) when they saw the other member (ordeal). The more frequently participants had tried to not think about a particular word, the less likely they were to retrieve it on a final memory test. This impairment even occurred when participants were given an "independent probe" test, i.e. given a similar category (insect) instead of the original cue (roach), and asked to fill in the blank on the memory test: insect-r_____. According to Anderson and Green, the fact that participants had a decreased ability to recall items they were told to forget strongly supports the existence of an inhibitory control mechanism and the idea that people have the ability to suppress unwanted memories.[18]

Though Anderson & Green's (2001) results have been replicated several times, a group of prominent psychology researchers using the same methodology as the original study were unable to replicate even the basic result (Bulevich, Roediger, Balota, & Butler, 2006).[18] They determined that suppression is not a robust experimental phenomenon in the think/no-think paradigm and suggested that Anderson and Green's findings could be explained by retroactive interference, or simply thinking about X when told to "not think" about Y.[18]

Amnesia for trauma or abuse

Amnesia, the forgetting of important personal information, usually occurs because of disease or injury to the brain, while psychogenic amnesia, which involves a loss of personal identity and has psychological causes, is rare.[3] Nonetheless, a range of studies have concluded that at least 10% of physical and sexual abuse victims forget the abuse.[19][20]Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag Hopper cites several studies which indicate that some abuse victims will have intervals of complete amnesia for their abuse.[21] Peer reviewed and clinical studies have documented the existence of recovered memory; one website lists 43 legal cases where an individual whose claim to have recovered a repressed memory has been accepted by a court.[22] Traumatic amnesia, which allegedly involves the forgetting of specific traumatic events for long periods of time, is highly controversial, as is repression, the psychodynamic explanation of traumatic amnesia.[3] Because these concepts lack good empirical support, psychological scientists are skeptical about the validity of "recovered memories", and argue that some therapists, through suggestive techniques, have (un)knowingly encouraged false memories of victimization.[3]

Evidence against

The idea that subjects can actively inhibit a memory has many critics.[15] MacLeod (2003) challenged the idea of inhibition in cognitive control, arguing that inhibition can be attributed to conflict resolution, which is the error-prone act of choosing between two similar values that do not necessarily have the same pair.[23] Re-examine the pairs from above: Food-Cracker, Food-Strawberry, Red-Tomato, and Red-Blood. Memory inhibition theories suggest that recall of strawberry decreases when recall of tomato decreases because tomato's attributes are inhibited when red-blood is learned. MacLeod argues that inhibition does not take place, but instead is the result of confusion between similar word-pairs like food-tomato and red-strawberry that can lead to errors. This is different from tomato's attributes being inhibited.[23] "In most cases where inhibitory mechanisms have been offered to explain cognitive performance", explains MacLeod, "non-inhibitory mechanisms can accomplish the same goal" (p. 203).[23]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 MacLeod, C. M. (2007). "Chapter 1: The Concept of Inhibition in Cognition". in Gorfein, D.S.; MacLeod, C. M.. Inhibition in Cognition. American Psychological Association. pp. 3–23. ISBN 978-1-59147-930-7. 
  2. ↑ Neumann, E; Cherau, JF; Hood, KL; Steinnagel, SL (1993). "Does inhibition spread in a manner analogous to spreading activation?". Memory 1 (2): 81–105. doi:10.1080/09658219308258226. PMID 7584264. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Wade, C., Tavris, C. (2011). Psychology (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN:978-0-205-71146-8
  4. ↑ Mathews, P. M. (2011). "Chapter 5: The Mnemonic Brain: Neuroimaging, Neuropharmacology, and Disorders of Memory". in Nalbantian, S.; Mathews, P. M.; McClelland, J. L.. The Memory Processes: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives. MIT Press. pp. 99–127. ISBN 978-0-262-01457-1. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Dempster, F. N. (1995). "Chapter 1: An Historical Perspective". in Dempster, F.N.; Brainerd, C. J.. Interference and Inhibition in Cognition. Academic Press, Inc.. pp. 3–26. ISBN 978-0-12-208930-5. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Dagenbach, D.; Carr, T.H., eds (1994). Inhibitory Processes in Attention, Memory, and Language. Academic Press, Inc.. ISBN 978-0-12-200410-0. 
  7. ↑ Carr, T. H. (2007). "Chapter 15: Is It Time to Inhibit Inhibition? Lessons From a Decade of Inhibitory Processes in Cognition". in Gorfein, D.S.; MacLeod, C. M.. Inhibition in Cognition. American Psychological Association. pp. 3–23. ISBN 978-1-59147-930-7. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Bower, G. H. (2000). "Chapter 1: A Brief History of Memory Research". in Tulving, E.; Craik, F.I.M.. The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-518200-2. 
  9. ↑ Davidson, T; Kanoski, S; Walls, E; Jarrard, L,["Memory Inhibition and Energy Regulation"]"ElSevier"2005
  10. ↑ Slamecka NJ (1968). "An examination of trace storage in free recall". J Exp Psychol 76 (4): 504–13. doi:10.1037/h0025695. PMID 5650563. 
  11. ↑ Marsh, E. J.; Dolan, P. O.; Balota, D. A.; Roediger, H. L. (2004). "Part-set cuing effects in younger and older adults". Psychology and Aging 19 (1): 134–144. doi:10.1037/0882-7974.19.1.134. PMID 15065937. 
  12. ↑ Nairne, J. S. (2007). Roddy Roediger's Memory. In J. S. Nairne (Ed.), The foundations of remembering: Essays in honor of Henry L. Roediger, III. New York: Psychology Press http://www1.psych.purdue.edu/~nairne/pdfs/44.pdf
  13. ↑ "Predicting spontaneous recovery of memory". Nature 414 (6860): 167–8. 2001. doi:10.1038/35102676. PMID 11700545. 
  14. ↑ Zacks, R.T.; Hasher, L.; Li, K.Z.H. (2008). The Handbook of Aging and Cognition, 3rd edn. East Sussex: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-8058-5990-4.  (pages 293-258)
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Gorgein, D. S.; Brown, V. R.. (2007). "Chapter 6: Saying No to Inhibition: The Encoding and Use of Words". in Gorfein, D.S.; MacLeod, C. M.. Inhibition in Cognition. American Psychological Association. pp. 3–23. ISBN 978-1-59147-930-7. 
  16. ↑ "On the Status of Inhibitory Mechanism in Cognition: Memory Retrieval as a Model Case". Psychological Review 102 (1): 68–100. 1995. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.102.1.68. PMID 7878163. 
  17. ↑ "Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control". Nature 410 (6826): 366–9. 2001. doi:10.1038/35066572. PMID 11268212. 
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Bulevich, J. B.; Roediger, H.; Balota, D. A.; Butler, A. C. (2006). "Failures to find suppression of episodic memories in the think/no-think paradigm". Memory & Cognition 34 (8): 1569–1577. doi:10.3758/BF03195920. PMID 17489284. 
  19. ↑ Widom, Cathy Spatz; Morris, Suzanne (March 1997). "Accuracy of Adult Recollections of Childhood Victimization: Part 2. Childhood Sexual Abuse". Psychological Assessment (Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association) 9 (1): 34–46. doi:10.1037/1040-3590.9.1.34. EJ545434. ISSN 1040-3590. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ545434&searchtype=keyword&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&objectId=0900019b801126a6&accno=EJ545434&_nfls=false. Retrieved 2007-12-18. 
  20. ↑ Sheflin, Alan W; Brown, Daniel (1996). "Repressed Memory or Dissociative Amnesia: What the Science Says". Journal of Psychiatry & Law 24 (Summer): 143–88. doi:10.1177/009318539602400203. ISSN 0093-1853. 
  21. ↑ Hopper, Jim. "Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse Scientific Research & Scholarly Resources". http://www.jimhopper.com/memory. 
  22. ↑ "Recovered Memory Project". Taubman Center for Public Policy & American Institutions at Brown University. http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/Recovmem. 
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 MacLeod, C. M., Dodd, M. D., Sheard, E. D., Wilson, D. E., & Bibi, U. (2003). "In opposition to inhibition". In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, vol. 43, 163–214. New York, NY US: Elsevier Science.

External links



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Philosophy:Memory_inhibition&oldid=3286781"