Barrouillet, P. 1 , De Paepe, A. 2 & Langerock, N. 1
1 University of Geneva
2 Ghent University
The rapid forgetting of information is a ubiquitous and pervasive phenomenon. Surprisingly, after more than one century of investigation, the exact causes of this forgetting remain undecided. A venerable tradition has assumed that memory traces suffer from a temporal decay. However, modern psychology commonly assumes that forgetting is not due to decay, but to representation-based interference created by the intervening events occurring between encoding and retrieval. In two experiments, we show that time plays a causal role in forgetting from working memory. Adults were asked to remember series of items (either letters or spatial locations) while verifying multiplications before recall. The duration of the delay between encoding and recall was manipulated by presenting multiplications either in word (three x four = twelve) or digit format (3 x 4 = 12), the former taking longer to solve. In line with the temporal decay hypothesis, the longer solution times elicited by solving word multiplications resulted in poorer recall performance. Longer delays have the same effect on both verbal and visuo-spatial memory, making difficult to account for the effect by representation-based interference.