Dear all,
Professor Oliver Hardt (McGill Psychology) will be speaking in our first
Cognitive Area Seminar of the Winter 2017 semester this Friday, January
13th, 3:30 - 5 PM (Room S3/4, Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Docteur
Penfield Avenue).
His talk is titled, "How the Brain Forgets: Memory Interference and Decay."
For a full abstract, see below the dashed line.
Please join us at this event!
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How the Brain Forgets: Memory Interference and Decay
Professor Oliver Hardt, Department of Psychology, McGill University
Forgetting awaits most memories. Despite its prevalence, there is little
agreement about genuine types of forgetting, nor about forgetting
mechanisms. In an attempt to address this situation, I will present our
recent research on the loss of short-term and long-term memories. (1)
Short-term memories appear particularly sensitive to experiences that occur
shortly after their acquisition. It has been proposed that these
subsequent events interfere with memory stabilization and thus long-term
retention. We will report results of a series of experiments that partly
confirm this hypothesis, yet also demonstrate that short-term memories can
benefit from subsequent encoding, which can prolong their retention,
paradoxically even more so when both experiences are highly similar. (2)
Based on the assumption that the brain promiscuously forms new long-term
memories, we have suggested that a dedicated and well-regulated active
decay mechanism systematically erases these mostly superfluous records of
insignificant experiences. I will discuss several studies that identify
neurobiological components of the active decay system and that provide
empirical support for active decay theory.