ABSTRACT
For most of us, remembering is good; forgetting is bad – something we wish to avoid. For most of us, in fact, “forgetting things” is the biggest complaint we have about our memories. Contrary to such intuitions, however, forgetting is a necessary and critical aspect of an efficient and adaptive memory system and, often, exactly what we must do to keep our memories functioning optimally. When previously stored information becomes out of date or no longer functional, we need some way to set aside, suppress, or forget that old information. Additionally, when we search our memories for some desired piece of information, such as the name of a former colleague or the source of an article that we have recently read, we need to inhibit or “forget” closely related, but incorrect, pieces of information that compete for retrieval with the target of our search. As we and others have previously argued (e.g., R. A. Bjork, 1989; E. L. Bjork & Bjork, 1996; E. L. Bjork, Bjork, & Anderson, 1998; Macrae & MacLeod, 1999), without such active forgetting mechanisms, we would soon become incapable of retrieving the information we need now, owing to interference from all the related information we have learned in the past.
