The role of retroactive interference and consolidation in everyday forgetting *
John T. Wixted
Abstract
The mathematical form of the Ebbinghaus savings function is something close to a power law, which, in general terms, is to say that it declines rapidly at first but declines at a slower rate as time goes on. In the field of psychology, the story of interference has almost always focused on the retrieval cue, which makes sense in light of the critical role played by retrieval cues in episodic memory. The distinction between cue-overload retroactive interference and nonspecific retroactive interference is, from the authour's point of view, critical. In 1900, the German experimental psychologist Georg Elias Muller published a monograph with his student Alfons Pilzecker in which a new theory of forgetting was proposed, one that included a role for consolidation. From the early 1930s until the present day, experimental psychologists largely rejected this way of thinking as the cue-overload view of interference came to dominate.