This work takes a historical approach to discussing Brown's (1958) paper, "Some Tests of the Decay Theory of Immediate Memory". This work was and continues to be extremely influential in the field of forgetting over the short term. Its primary importance is in establishing a theoretical basis to consider a process of fundamental importance: memory decay. Brown (1958) established that time-based...

Across 3 experiments, we examined the interplay of part-list cuing and forgetting, employing 3 different methods to induce episodic forgetting-list--method directed forgetting, context-dependent forgetting, and proactive interference. For each form of forgetting, participants were asked at test to recall the target items of a previously studied list in the presence or the absence of the list's ...

Forgetting is a useful tool for tailoring ontologies by reducing the number of concepts and roles, while preserving sound and complete reasoning. Some attempts have been made to address the problem of forgetting in some relatively simple description logics (DLs) such as DL-Lite and extended EL . Ontologies in those works are mostly expressed as TBoxes rather than general knowledge bases (KBs). ...

Episodic forgetting can arise in a number of different situations. Recall of target material can be impaired if additional material is learned (interference), related information is repeatedly retrieved (retrieval-induced forgetting), or an instruction to intentionally forget the target material is provided (directed forgetting). The question arises which mechanisms underlie these different for...

In this paper, we propose an alternative notion, called weak forgetting, of forgetting a set of predicates in a first-order theory. One important feature of this new notion is that the result of weak forgetting is always first-order expressible. In contrast, this is not the case for the traditional notion of forgetting, called strong forgetting, introduced by Lin and Reiter. As a consequence, t...

Forgetting is an important tool for reducing ontologies by eliminating some redundant concepts and roles while preserving sound and complete reasoning. Attempts have previously been made to address the problem of forgetting in relatively simple description logics (DLs) such as DL-Lite and extended EL. However, the issue of forgetting for ontologies in more expressive description logics, such as...

Recent work suggests a link between sleep and memory consolidation, indicating that sleep in comparison to wakefulness stabilizes memories. However, relatively little is known about how sleep affects forgetting. Here we examined whether sleep influences directed forgetting, the finding that people can intentionally forget obsolete memories when cued to do so. We applied the list-method directed...

Recent studies have identified molecular pathways driving forgetting and supported the notion that forgetting is a biologically active process. The circuit mechanisms of forgetting, however, remain largely unknown. Here we report two sets of Drosophila neurons that account for the rapid forgetting of early olfactory aversive memory. We show that inactivating these neurons inhibits memory decay ...

Two experiments studied how the age at which words are acquired (Age of Acquisition, AoA) modulates forgetting. Experiment 1 employed the retrieval-practice paradigm to test the effect of AoA on the incidental forgetting that emerges after solving competition during retrieval (i.e., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). Standard RIF appeared with late-acquired words, but this effect disappeared w...

Forgetting is one of the most important concepts in logic based problem solving, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. However, the size of the forgetting result is exponential in worst case. To address this issue, we consider the problem of polynomially bounded forgetting, i.e., when the size of the forgetting result can be expressed polynomially. We coin the notion of polynom...