Forgetting – Memory (PSY)

00:01 Okay. How do we forget things? We all forget lots, we’re very forgetful, some more than others.

00:07 But here are sort of some stages that we’re going to talk about.

00:10 So there’s attention and that needs to go on to encoding.

00:13 So this is the phase where you’re drawing attention to something, the information is going in, and you encode.

00:18 So the inability to complete these steps means that it doesn’t actually enter memory, so you’re going to forget.

00:22 Then we have, it gets encoded and it gets retained and goes into memory, and the stages that we talked about.

00:28 Unable to do that, the information is lost, you forget.

00:33 Then there’s retention, you have it in your memory, but the inability to actually recall it is called forgetting.

00:40 So at the end of the day, the end result is essentially the same, you forgot.

00:45 But, if I tell you something and you weren’t paying attention and I say, “I told you. Don’t you remember?” “Well, actually, I wasn’t paying attention,” so we lump that in as “I forgot” but it’s because you actually didn’t make that stage from attention to encoding, opposed to, “Hey, you saw five different things. Why did you only remember one?” “Well, the other four actually didn’t make it into my memory and they were excluded,” considering, say, the Broadbent filter, they were filtered out.

01:11 Only one of those five things that I saw,” say, the name of a book.

01:15 “Only one of them got stored and that’s why I’m remembering that one.

01:17 But I forgot -- ‘I forgot’ -- the other four.” You didn’t actually forget them.

01:21 They were decayed.

01:22 They weren’t actually acquired and stayed in memory.

01:24 So my take home here is forgetting is when you fail to recall information, but there’s various ways in which we, society wise, say -- socially speaking, say you forgot.