Abstract
Forgetting impacts on many aspects of cognitive function in everyday life, but in spite of its significance, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. It has been suggested that objects are maintained as integrated units in working memory and when forgotten they are lost as a whole, without leaving any trace. To study the validity of this claim we used a memory task with a continuous analogue scale of reporting with difficult-to-verbalize stimuli and variable delays. Analysis of the distribution of errors made by healthy participants showed that, contrary to the claim above, items are not only forgotten as a whole but the precision of report also deteriorates with time. While in short delays item “disappearance” seems to be a stationary process (not modulated by time) the decrease in precision rapidly saturates. Thus, the temporal dynamics of forgetting is different when considering the quality and quantity of memory representations. We continued by exploring the different neural mechanisms that might explain these temporal dynamics.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015