Although the biological bases of forgetting remain obscure, the consensus among cognitive psychologists emphasizes interference processes, rejecting decay in accounting for memory loss. In contrast to this view, recent advances in understanding the neurobiology of long-term memory maintenance lead us to propose that a brain-wide well-regulated decay process, occurring mostly during sleep, systematically removes selected memories. Down-regulation of this decay process can increase the life expectancy of a memory and may eventually prevent its loss. Memory interference usually occurs during certain (...) active processing phases, such as encoding and retrieval, and will be stronger in brain areas with minimal sensory integration and less pattern separation. In areas with efficient pattern separation, such as the hippocampus, interference-driven forgetting will be minimal, and, consequently, decay will cause most forgetting. (shrink)

Is consolidation needed to account for retroactive interference in free recall? Interfering mental activity during the retention interval of a memory task impairs performance, in particular if the interference occurs in temporal proximity to the encoding of the to-be-remembered information. There are at least two rival theoretical accounts of this temporal gradient of retroactive interference. The cognitive neuroscience literature has suggested neural consolidation is a pivotal factor determining item recall. According to this account, interfering activity interrupts consolidation processes that would (...) otherwise stabilize the memory representations of TBR items post-encoding. Temporal distinctiveness theory, by contrast, proposes that the retrievability of items depends on their isolation in psychological time. According to this theory, information processed after the encoding of TBR material will reduce the temporal distinctiveness of the TBR information. To test between these accounts, implementations of consolidation were added to the SIMPLE model of memory and learning. We report data from two experiments utilizing a two-list free recall paradigm. Modeling results imply that SIMPLE was able to model the data and did not benefit from the addition of consolidation. It is concluded that the temporal gradient of retroactive interference cannot be taken as evidence for memory consolidation. (shrink)