Georgiou Antonios, Katkov Mikhail, Tsodyks Misha
Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
Department of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA.
J Math Neurosci. 2021 Jan 23;11(1):4. doi: 10.1186/s13408-021-00102-6.
Memory and forgetting constitute two sides of the same coin, and although the first has been extensively investigated, the latter is often overlooked. A possible approach to better understand forgetting is to develop phenomenological models that implement its putative mechanisms in the most elementary way possible, and then experimentally test the theoretical predictions of these models. One such mechanism proposed in previous studies is retrograde interference, stating that a memory can be erased due to subsequently acquired memories. In the current contribution, we hypothesize that retrograde erasure is controlled by the relevant "importance" measures such that more important memories eliminate less important ones acquired earlier. We show that some versions of the resulting mathematical model are broadly compatible with the previously reported power-law forgetting time course and match well the results of our recognition experiments with long, randomly assembled streams of words.
记忆与遗忘是同一枚硬币的两面，虽然前者已得到广泛研究，但后者却常常被忽视。一种更好地理解遗忘的可能方法是开发现象学模型，以尽可能最基本的方式实现其假定机制，然后通过实验检验这些模型的理论预测。先前研究中提出的一种这样的机制是逆行干扰，即认为记忆可能会因随后获得的记忆而被抹去。在当前的研究中，我们假设逆行擦除是由相关的“重要性”度量控制的，使得更重要的记忆会消除更早获得的不太重要的记忆。我们表明，所得数学模型的某些版本与先前报道的幂律遗忘时间进程大致相符，并且与我们对长的、随机组合的单词流进行的识别实验结果匹配良好。
