Forgetfulness

I feel as though my memory is not up to par but I learned that most information is forgotten within the first day of learning it. There are five key reasons why we as humans forget information. We could have encoding failure where our short-term memory does not encode information into long-term memory. Our memory can decay over time and our memories can degrade. We could have retrieval failure where our long-term memories are inaccessible. This is called the tip of the tongue phenomenon. (i.e. seeing someone's face but forgetting their name but you have a feeling that you know it) There is aslo a theory about motivated forgetting. We as people are motivated to forget painful, threatening, or embarassing memories. In class my group did a project to sense which is remembered more; a slideshow with pictures, or tangible objects one could feel. Our conclusion was that kids were close to half-and-half for each but more students remembered the objects they could feel. Each alternated between getting the movie first or the tangible objects first. This experiment could also be used to test proactive interference (old information interfering with new information) and retroactive interference (new innformation interfering with old information). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7isjhz1GpHg is a video of four ap psych students rapping about memory. Everyone learns and remembers in different ways and if song is a way that works for you, here you go!