Forgetting and it's causes

Forgetting :

Forgetting is a loss permanent or temporary of the ability to retain, recall or recognize something learnt or experienced earlier. Ebbing haus was the first person to study forgetting scientifically. He memorized many list of nousense syllables by repeated reading until he was able to repeat them perfectly once. He re - learned some of them for 20 minutes later, some after a day, some after 2 days later and so on. He found that about 47% was forgotten in 20 minutes, 66% in one day, 72% in two days, 75% in 6 days and 79% in 31 days. Thus forgetting was rapid in the beginning and then became slower and slower as the days passed on.

On the basis of the causes forgetting may be divided into two types namely normal and abnormal.

Causes of forgetting :

There are many factors which may lead to normal forgetting

1. Poor learning :

Much forgetting is due to poor learning. Many names of persons, things places etc are forgotten because we paid very little attention to them when we learnt them. Also when we are emotionally disturbed we don't pay attention to things that happened at that time and so we don't remember.

2. Change of stimulating condition :

Forgetting may occur because some of the stimuli present during the original learning are missing at the time of recall. For example we may fail to recognize a policemen or a bus conductor or a postman when they are seen in the similar clothes because we always see them in their uniforms only.

3. Retro active and pro active inhibition :

An important cause of forgetting seems to be the conflict between what has been learnt in the past and subsequent learning. When the present learning interferes with past learning we have retro active inhibition. On the other hand in pro - active inhibition the past learning interferes with the present learning. Both of them can be demonstrated in the laboratory.

In order to illustrate retro - active inhibition the following experiment may be quoted. Two groups of students namely experimental and control are taken both the groups are asked to learn a list of nousense syllables namely list A. After this the experimental group learns another list namely list B. While the experimental is doing this the control group is asked to engage itself in some unrelated activity. After the experimental group has learnt list B both the groups are asked to recall list A.......................read

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