ABSTRACT
Visual long-term memory presents us with a paradox. It appears to be both limitless in capacity, and yet we can document failures to remember visual information in the laboratory and our daily lives. Here we discuss how laboratory experiments show that a major source of our visual long-term memory failures appears to be due to the competition between categorically related visual representations stored in memory. In this chapter, we test three proposals regarding the nature of this competition. First we asked whether induced forgetting operates over objects that are devoid of semantic information. We find that subjects do not forget objects that lack clear semantic associations. Next, does induced forgetting operate over emotionally arousing stimuli?
We find that emotionally charged images are forgotten at rates similar to emotionally neutral stimuli. Finally, does induced forgetting depend on interference generated by objects from other categories? We show that inter-category interference does not play a part in our forgetting of objects represented in visual long-term memory. These results help to constrain models that seek to account for forgetting from visual long-term memory, and demonstrate the necessary features of inter-object competition that result in this inability to remember where I put my pants. (If you were living under a rock in 2014, this is a joke. In The LEGO Movie, Lord Business uses a TV show called “Where are my pants?” to distract the characters from his evil plan of gluing the world together (Lord et al., 2014).)
