Medium strength visual long-term memories are the most fragile

Abstract

What memories do humans forget? One theory proposes that memories stored with moderate activation levels are weakened when faced with competitive stress so that they are particularly prone to be forgotten. However, research suggests that visual long-term memories are stronger than memories of other modalities, and therefore may never fall into this moderate activation zone. Here we tested these competing predictions by showing to-be-remembered pictures while we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) indexing memory activation during encoding. We found that visual memories with medium levels of activation when first encoded were more prone to forgetting than memories with high or low encoding activation levels, but this only occurred if a memory was faced with competition. This study shows that we forget moderately activated memories when they are subjected to competition, regardless of the modality of experience.