Forgetting Without Inhibition: a Resource Depletion Account of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

Inhibition as a psychological construct has been used to explain a wide range of social and cognitive phenomena that show a decrement in memory performance relative to a baseline. Decrements have been argued to reflect inhibitory processes which serve to suppress a response to a stimulus. We replicate the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) effect and use RIF as a tool to demonstrate that decrements in performance do not require an inhibitory mechanism. We observed that decrements in performance occur only to the extent that self-regulatory resources are depleted. We propose a resource depletion mechanism to account for such decrements in performance.

Citation:

Andrea Hughes and Antonia Mantonakis (2009) ,"Forgetting Without Inhibition: a Resource Depletion Account of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 773-774.