Inhibition as a cause of forgetting

Abstract

Inhibitory control is a fundamental process that enables suppression of representations or processes that interfere with ongoing cognition and behavior. This chapter reviews the role of such control processes in causing forgetting from long-term memory. We consider several functional contexts that trigger inhibitory control, including the need to selectively retrieve information, and the need to stop retrieval. These give rise to retrieval-induced forgetting and suppression-induced forgetting, respectively. We review the extensive cognitive and neurobiological work conducted over the last three decades on how inhibitory control induces forgetting in these contexts, including work establishing its fundamental functional properties, neural mechanisms underlying them, and recent work establishing the species- generality of the phenomena. Taken together, this work illustrates the adaptive function of inhibition in overcoming interference that can arise during memory retrieval, and in adapting the state of memory in accordance with current behavioral goals.

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