Contextual clues play a role in what people are able to store and retrieve from their memory<\/strong>, says Robert A. Bjork, PhD, distinguished research professor in the department of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. A change in context can cause forgetting, but it can also change — and enrich — how information is encoded and retrieved, which can enhance learning<\/strong>. Bjork defines forgetting as “a decrease in how readily accessible some information or procedure is at a given point in time.” For example, some items may be strongly imprinted in our memories (referred to as “strong storage strength”) — such as a childhood phone number — but may be difficult to retrieve quickly due to the length of time since that information has been accessed (“weak retrieval strength”).<\/p>\n Bjork will discuss the differences in storage and retrieval and how “forgetting enables, rather than undoes, learning” in the plenary session “Forgetting as a friend of learning” on Wednesday, June 20, at the Madison Concourse Hotel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the American Physiological Society press release: Forgetting names, skills or information learned in class is often thought of as purely negative. However unintuitive it may seem, research suggests that… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[319,4],"tags":[18,19,443,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26743"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26743"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26987,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26743\/revisions\/26987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/thinking_pondering.jpg\")
Forgetting names, skills or information learned in class is often thought of as purely negative. However unintuitive it may seem, research suggests that forgetting plays a positive role in learning<\/strong>: It can actually increase long-term retention, information retrieval and performance<\/strong>. The findings will be presented today at the American Physiological Society (APS) Institute on Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wis.<\/p>\n