Psychology · Ch 6 — Human Memory

Nature and Causes of Forgetting

Forgetting is something every person experiences routinely, along with its consequences — the embarrassment of not recalling a familiar name, or the panic of finding that carefully memorised material has suddenly become unavailable right before an examination. This raises an obvious question: why does forgetting happen at all? Is information we commit to long-term memory somehow lost outright? Did we simply not memorise it thoroughly enough? Was it never encoded correctly in the first place, or did it get distorted or misplaced during storage? A number of theories have been put forward to answer this, and the sections below examine the ones that have received the most serious attention and support.

Figure 6.2Fig.6.2: Ebbinghaus's Curve of Forgetting — amount retained (per cent) plotted against time since learning (in days); a steep initial drop within the first hours, then a long, gradually flattening tail out to 100 days.

Fig. 6.2 — Fig.6.2: Ebbinghaus's Curve of Forgetting — amount retained (per cent) plotted against time since learning (in days); a steep initial drop within the first hours, then a long, gradually flattening tail out to 100 days.

Drawn by us to help you understand the concept clearly, and verified to make sure it's accurate. For exams, practice from your NCERT textbook's own diagram.

Fig.6.2: Ebbinghaus's Curve of Forgetting — amount retained (per cent) plotted against time since learning (in days); a steep initial drop within the first hours, then a long, gradually flattening tail out to 100 days. Own-illustrated for this platform from the real NCERT page's own facts (composition, labels, and layout are recreated; the specific arti …

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