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  • Title: [Forgetting: a product of memory].
    Author: Brouillet D, Syssau A.
    Journal: Psychol Neuropsychiatr Vieil; 2005 Dec; 3(4):301-13. PubMed ID: 16316821.
    Abstract:
    If someone asks you what your children talk about at breakfast this morning, it is likely that you not able to tell him. This forgetting will not appear like a mark of memory disorder. But if it concerns a 80 years old people! Over the last decade, it has been claimed that aging induces reduced inhibitory processing and this has been put forward to explain forgetting. However, several experiments have proposed that non inhibitory mechanisms can account for the pattern of results. So, aging doesn't involve inhibitory deficit. Recently, a procedure known as the "retrieval practice paradigm," claimed to give a good measure of inhibitory processing whose goal is to suppress competing traces during an episodic retrieval. In this paradigm, participants study exemplars from taxonomic categories (e.g., fruit-orange, fruit-banana, drink-scotch) and then practice retrieving half of the exemplars from half of the categories by recalling those studied items given a category and letter stem as cue (e.g., fruit-or _). Each item is tested several times. After a delay, subjects are tested on all items. Practice impairs recall of the remaining non practiced exemplars of the practiced categories, phenomenon known as "retrieval-induced forgetting". In the present experiment, we would to determine whether retrieving an item from semantic memory inhibits other concepts that compete with it during retrieval. Indeed, studies of lexical ambiguity resolution provide evidence for inhibition in semantic retrieval. For that, we use homographs because their natural characteristic involves inhibiting one of their two meanings. We expected that if participants practice a word related to a homograph's subordinate meaning, word related to its dominant meaning would need to be inhibited. Results show that old people showed normal levels of inhibition. Moreover, results show an interaction between practiced-unpracticed items and homograph's polarity. These results suggest that a deficit in inhibitory process can not explain forgetting.
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