Lesson 10 - Retention vs. Forgetting

Presentation of Theoretical Construct

 

Lecture Information:

Maintenance Activities

1. Rehearsal

   1. The most common maintenance activities usually involve some form of rehearsal of the items that you want to remember.  The first of which is most often referred to a "maintenance repetition."  With my college aged population, it is at this point where I point out how last weekend they kept repeating the girl's phone number until they could enter it into their cell phones.  Their heads just bob up an down, "oh yeah..."  It is the most common type of rehearsal.

   2. Another type of rehearsal is "elaboration."  That is where a story is attached, associated, or taken from the items that you want to remember.  For example, my previous license plate number was GZL-091.  I cannot forget it.  "GZL" sounds very similar to gazelle, and I remember gazelles when I was living in Botswana, Africa.  I can't forget GZL.  My car was also a 1991 model so I couldn't forget 091 either.  This chunk is just stuck now in my memory.  The more outlandish the attachment the better the memory.  It is always easier to recall the unusual rather than the mundane.

2. Chunking

   1. Another very common technique to improve memory is to group objects into units of meaning.  Rather than trying to remember a series of numbers like 8349622, you mentally group them into 3 chunks that you tell yourself is "eight hundred thirty four, ninety six, and twenty two."  This mental act actually reduces the number of items in working memory from 7 to 3 which most people find easier to remember. 

Forgetting

1. Interference

   1. This type of forgetting is when two or more items gets blended or fractured due to too much processing at any one time. As you begin to accumulate more and more items for long-term memory, each item begins to lose it's novelty, uniqueness, or differentiation.  As a result a student might begin to blend other students' names together and come up with Bronnie for Connie and Brenda. This is also a very common problem with 2nd language acquisition. The first language has a grammar structure that is not present in the 2nd language and so the speaker uses the new vocabulary but the first language grammar.  It really sticks out to native speakers.

2. Decay

   1. This concept is just like the old adage of "use it or lose it."  Items that are not functional, relevant, or important to the learner, eventually get cognitively discarded.  Again this is very sensitive to skills based learning like verbal abilities.  As Washington Irving stated in Rip Van Winkle, "The tongue is the only tool that grows sharper with use." 

3. Function of Forgetting

   1. Forgetting is actually a net positive for humans.  If you didn't have the capacity of discarding items that don't mean much to you then you would soon be overwhelmed with useless information.  Therefore, forgetting makes for a more efficiently functioning mental process.

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