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The finding that all altricial species experience profound forgetting of episodic information formed during infancy suggests that human-centric explanations of infantile amnesia are inherently incomplete. A comprehensive understanding of infantile amnesia will require a neurobiological explanation of why infants forget.
Forgetting or disremembering is the apparent loss or modification of information already encoded and stored in an individual's short or long-term memory.It is a spontaneous or gradual process in which old memories are unable to be recalled from memory storage.
Amnesia, the forgetting of important personal information, usually occurs because of disease or injury to the brain, while psychogenic amnesia, which involves a loss of personal identity and has psychological causes, is rare. [3] Nonetheless, a range of studies have concluded that at least 10% of physical and sexual abuse victims forget the abuse.
The development of memory is a lifelong process that continues through adulthood. Development etymologically refers to a progressive unfolding. Memory development tends to focus on periods of infancy, toddlers, children, and adolescents, yet the developmental progression of memory in adults and older adults is also circumscribed under the umbrella of memory development.
German philosopher named Hermann Ebbinghaus decided to measure his own memory for lists of nonsense syllables at various times after studying them. He decided to draw out a curve of his forgetting pattern over time. He realized that there is a rapid drop-off in retention during the first tests and there is a slower rate of forgetting later on. [3]
The forgetting curve hypothesizes the decline of memory retention in time. This curve shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. [ 1 ] A related concept is the strength of memory that refers to the durability that memory traces in the brain .
As seen in the examples above, although memory does degenerate with age, it is not always classified as a memory disorder. The difference in memory between normal aging and a memory disorder is the amount of beta-amyloid deposits, hippocampal neurofibrillary tangles, or amyloid plaques in the cortex.
Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a memory phenomenon where remembering causes forgetting of other information in memory. The phenomenon was first demonstrated in 1994, although the concept of RIF has been previously discussed in the context of retrieval inhibition .