Ebbinghaus created more than 2,000 nonsense syllables, such as dax, bap, and rif, and studied his own memory for them, learning as many as 420 lists of 16 nonsense syllables for one experiment. It has been known since the pioneering work of Hermann Ebbinghaus ( 1885/1913 ) that as time passes, memories get harder to recall. Most of the time this is not problematic, but in certain situations, such as when you are studying for an exam, failures to encode due to distraction can have serious repercussions.Īnother proposed reason why we forget is that memories fade, or decay, over time. Similarly, it has been well documented that distraction during learning impairs later memory (e.g., Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & Anderson, 1996 ). However, few of us have studied the features of a penny in great detail, and since we have not attended to those details, we fail to recognize them later. For example, people have a lot of trouble recognizing an actual penny out of a set of drawings of very similar pennies, or lures, even though most of us have had a lifetime of experience handling pennies ( Nickerson & Adams, 1979 ). Usually, encoding failures occur because we are distracted or are not paying attention to specific details. If you fail to encode information into memory, you are not going to remember it later on. One very common and obvious reason why you cannot remember a piece of information is because you did not learn it in the first place.
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