ABSTRACT
Several different accounts of forgetting have emerged in previous chapters. Notable, of course, is Tulving’s encoding specificity principle, which is directed towards understanding the failure to acccess information available in memory. The cue-overload principle also stresses the distinction between forgetting due to loss of availability and forgetting due to loss of accessibility. Some of the work on iconic memory seems to imply that precategorical information decays, but may also be interfered with by visual masks. And the notion of interference has been useful in accounting for many other findings, including, for example, some of the effects of semantic or acoustic similarity on serial recall performance.
