Retroactive Interference Model of Power-Law Forgetting
Memory and forgetting constitute two sides of the same coin, and although the first has been rigorously investigated, the latter is often overlooked. A number of experiments under the realm of psychology and experimental neuroscience have described the properties of forgetting in humans and animals, showing that forgetting exhibits a power-law relationship with time. These results indicate a counter-intuitive property of forgetting, namely that old memories are more stable than younger ones. We have devised a phenomenological model that is based on the principle of retroactive interference, such that stronger memories acquired after weaker ones erase the latter. The model has only one free integer parameter and can be solved analytically. Recognition experiments with long streams of words were performed, resulting in a good match to a five-dimensional version of the model.