Remembering and Forgetting
In our discussion of the structure of memory you saw that information stays in working memory for a very limited amount of time. On the other hand, information in long-term memory seems to remain there indefinitely. Thus, it would appear that time alone can cause forgetting of information in working memory; but an inability to retrieve, or gain access to the stored information , accounts for forgetting in long-term memory. Although these two conclusions seem to have research support, they only partially explain forgetting. In this section of our discussion, we will consider some evidence to indicate that a variety of reasons exist to explain forgetting. Some terms used in the following part of this section need to be identified and defined. Encoding is the transformation of information to be remembered