Patterns of forgetting

In this study, memory for a list of words and narrative texts was assessed up to 12 weeks after initial learning. We observed that memory for the word list showed some forgetting early on, followed by an abrupt loss after about seven days. Moreover, for the narrative text, surface form memories were forgotten to around chance level after about an hour, whereas textbase level memories were retained until about seven days when memory suddenly dropped to around chance levels, much like the word list memories. In contrast to this, memory at the event model level remained high throughout, although there was some forgetting over time. To account for this pattern of retention and forgetting, a simulation was developed as a proof of concept to illustrate our theoretical interpretation.
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research