Schooler,L.J.
Hertwig,R.

Some theorists, ranging from W. James (1890) to contemporary psychologists, have argued that forgetting is the key to proper functioning of memory. The authors elaborate on the notion of beneficial forgetting by proposing that loss of information aids inference heuristics that exploit mnemonic information. To this end, the authors bring together 2 research programs that take an ecological approach to studying cognition. Specifically, they implement fast and frugal heuristics within the ACT-R cognitive architecture. Simulations of the recognition heuristic, which relies on systematic failures of recognition to infer which of 2 objects scores higher on a criterion value, demonstrate that forgetting can boost accuracy by increasing the chances that only 1 object is recognized. Simulations of the fluency heuristic, which arrives at the same inference on the basis of the speed with which objects are recognized, indicate that forgetting aids the discrimination between the objects' recognition speeds.

Schooler, L. J., & Hertwig, R. (2005). How forgetting aids heuristic inference. Psychological Review, 112, 610-628.(Reprinted in Heuristics: The foundations of adaptive behavior, pp. 84-107, by G. Gigerenzer, R. Hertwig, & T. Pachur, Eds., 2011, New York: Oxford University Press) (Full text)

Publication year	2005
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/ls/LS_How_2005.pdf View
Categories:	MemoryRecognition heuristicFluency heuristic
Keywords:	act-rfluencyforgettingheuristicsmemoryrecognition