Memory Inhibition

Memory inhibition, in psychology, is the ability not to remember information that is irrelevant to the task at hand, a type of the broader cognitive inhibition, which is the stopping or overriding of a mental process in whole or in part. It is considered a critical part of an effective memory system: because most memories are eventually forgotten while only some are retained for a lifetime, evolutionary psychologists regard forgetting as adaptive, since it supports fast and selective recall, such as remembering only where a car is currently parked rather than every place it has ever been parked. Remembering something effectively therefore requires not only activating the relevant information but also inhibiting the irrelevant information competing with it, and many documented memory phenomena appear to involve this kind of inhibition, though researchers continue to debate how cleanly inhibition can be distinguished from ordinary interference.