ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with D. L. Schacter's seven sins of memory, along with a consideration of why these sins may actually be virtues. His seven sins of memory are: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Early ideas about forgetting suggested that memory traces decay over time. Forgetting is one of the biggest challenges of memory. Interference is one of the primary mechanisms of forgetting. There are several kinds of interference, including proactive interference, retroactive interference, associative interference, and general interference. One way to reduce and control it is by using inhibition to actively reduce the activation of interfering memories. There are a number of ways that inhibition influences memory. That said, inhibiting related but irrelevant memories can also bring about forgetting. The chapter also looks at the influence of drugs and alcohol, which produce changes in memory and forgetting.
