ABSTRACT
It may seem that remembering and forgetting reect two ends of a single continuum-that to remember is to avoid forgetting. Yet, in many instances, forgetting plays an essential and adaptive role in our ability to remember (e.g., E. L. Bjork & Bjork, 1988; R. A. Bjork & Bjork, 1992). Without some means of forgetting information that has become outdated or irrelevant, it would be incredibly dicult to remember information that is relevant. One mechanism that appears to aord this adaptive form of forgetting is inhibition (see, e.g., Anderson, 2003; E. L. Bjork, Bjork, & Anderson, 1998; R. A. Bjork, 1989). A given retrieval cue may activate many items in memory, and inhibition acts to decrease the accessibility of nontarget items in order to facilitate access to target items. is inhibition may explain why retrieving some items from memory causes the forgetting of other items in memory, a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, R. A. Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). It is argued herein that competition is a critical factor in the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting and, furthermore, that retrieval-induced forgetting is not as much a consequence of retrieval as it is a consequence of the inhibitory processes that resolve competition during retrieval.
