Focuses on research on attribute forgetting--the inability to
remember specific characteristics of a place, event, or individual. How
details of an event become hazy over time; How familiarity--the sense
that we've previously encountered a particular person, place or
thing--tends to outlast other characteristics; Why even bad publicity is
better than no publicity at all.
By
PT Staff, published on March 01, 1995
MEMORY
You may have planned your wedding down to the very last detail--but
do you still recall which vegetable was served at the reception? Over
time, details like this become hazier, blend with other memories, or
disappear altogether.
It's called attribute forgetting: the inability to remember
specific characteristics of a place, event, or individual. And it happens
to us all.
This process leads to what politicians and Roseanne have known all
along--that even bad publicity is better than no publicity at all,
observes Kent State University psychologist David Riccio, Ph.D., in
American Scientist (Vol. 49, No. 11).
Attributes disappear from our memory at different rates, but
familiarity--the sense we've previously encountered a particular person,
place, or thing--tends to outlast other characteristics. Experiments show
that people think more favorably of things they've seen before, even if
they've forgotten having seen them. Come election day, we may vote for a
politician because we remember his name--but not his recent
indictment.
Attribute forgetting pops up in some surprising places--such as our
response to drugs. Rats that have developed tolerance to morphine lose
some of it when moved from their usual cage. Conditioning, it seems,
links the drug's effects with environmental cues. But shifting cages
seven days after the last drug administration has no effect on
tolerance--perhaps because the rats forget some of those cues.
In other studies, when Riccio made certain memories inaccessible to
rats by inducing amnesia, those memories were still prone to attribute
forgetting. The results suggest that even memories that are off-limits to
consciousness may deteriorate with time. Unfortunately, the repressed
memory debate has led people to believe that if such memories exist, they
are maintained in a pristine state.
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