remember that time i took a home wine making course and forgot how to drive

Why do we forget?

How many participants did Maria Wimber study?

Why did the researchers want to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and?

Does memory cause forgetting?

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Why do we forget?

We knew, from earlier work, that remembering can cause forgetting, and this is thought to occur because of an inhibitory signal from the frontal cortex that suppresses similar memories and prevents them from interfering with retrieval. Until now, though, evidence for this has been hard to come by, one reason being that it is difficult to distinguish between the brain activity patterns associated with related memories using fMRI.

How many participants did Maria Wimber study?

In this latest study, Maria Wimber and her colleagues recruited 24 healthy participants and trained them on a visual memory task in which they were shown a series of words, each associate with a pair of images. For example, the word ‘sand’ was shown with an image of Marilyn Monroe and then one of a hat. The researchers then scanned the participants’ brains while they performed a selective retrieval task, in which they saw some of the words again, and had to indicate the first image they associated with it.

Why did the researchers want to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and?

The researchers wanted to track and compare changes in the participants’ memories for images they had been asked to recall and those they had not. They assumed that seeing each of the ‘cue’ words again would reactivate activity patterns for both of the associated images, and predicted that recalling one image would engage inhibitory mechanisms that actively diminish the memory of the other, competing image.

Does memory cause forgetting?

Wimber and her colleagues say their findings strongly suggest that remembering induces forgetting by actively suppressing the brain activity encoding similar, interfering memories. They believe this is an adaptive mechanism that increases the likelihood that we will successfully encode and remember only the most relevant information. Top-down prefrontal control of memory seems to break down in schizophrenia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), so follow-up work that provides more details about these processes could advance our understanding of such conditions.