The Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences at UCLA

“In this talk, Ralph Miller will briefly review sources of non-pathological forgetting, including spontaneous decay with increasing retention intervals, displacement from short-term memory by irrelevant information, associative interference by similar but different information, and inadequate retrieval cues at test. He will discuss the potential for recovery of target information from each of these types of forgetting without further training and will consider the frequently overlooked but highly beneficial consequences of most forgetting.

Miller will examine forgetting caused by associative interference, including influences of the test situation, the retention interval as a function of whether the interfering information was acquired before or after the target information, and the nature of the target information and interfering information. He will also describe some basic procedures for reducing or increasing forgetting when desired.”