Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

Retrieval-induced forgetting, abbreviated RIF, is a memory phenomenon in which the act of remembering some information causes a person to forget other, related information also held in memory. The phenomenon was first demonstrated in 1994, though the underlying idea had already been discussed earlier in the context of retrieval inhibition, and it is typically shown through a three-phase experiment consisting of an initial study phase, a practice phase in which only some of the studied material is retrieved, and a final test of everything originally studied; researchers have used several kinds of final tests, including recall with only category cues, recall with category and word-stem cues, and recognition tests, and the effect appears across many kinds of material and in group settings as well as individual ones. Although retrieval-induced forgetting arises from an act of conscious, deliberate remembering, the resulting forgetting itself is thought to happen implicitly, below the level of awareness, and researchers continue to debate whether it results from a process that actively inhibits competing information or instead from ordinary interference between different pieces of information held in memory; the effect is also reduced in certain special clinical populations and has been linked to the memory-retrieval strategies a person uses, since disrupting those strategies changes how strongly the effect appears.