[3] According to evolutionary psychologists, forgetting is adaptive because it facilitates selectivity of rapid, efficient recollection.
In the early days of psychology, the concept of inhibition was prevalent and influential (e.g., Breese, 1899; Pillsbury, 1908; Wundt, 1902).
[1] These psychologists applied the concept of inhibition (and interference) to early theories of learning and forgetting.
[6] Research on a wide variety of psychological processes, including attention, perception, learning and memory, psycholinguistics, cognitive development, aging, learning disabilities, and neuropsychology, suggests that resistance to interference (which implies capacity for inhibition) is an important part of cognition.
[9] The "part-set cuing effect" was initially discovered by Slamecka (1968), who found that providing a portion of to-be-remembered items as test cues often impairs retrieval of the remaining un-cued items compared with performance in a no-cue (free-recall) control condition.
[13] Using inhibition to explain memory processes began with the work of Hasher and Zacks (1988), which focused on the cognitive costs associated with aging and bridging the attention-memory gap.
[14] Anderson and Spellman's model of retrieval-induced forgetting suggests that when items compete during retrieval, an inhibitory process will serve to suppress those competitors.
[15] In 1995, Anderson and Spellman conducted a three-phase study using their retrieval-induced forgetting model to demonstrate unlearning as inhibition.
[16] Anderson and Spellman observed that items that shared a semantic relationship with practiced information was less recallable.
This finding suggests that associative competition by explicit category cue is not the only factor in retrieval difficulty.
[1] This explains why an item that is very similar to tomato, but not from the same pair, also exhibits decreased recall rate.
[19][20][21] Some studies claim that the rate of delayed recall of many forms of traumatic experiences (including natural disasters, kidnapping, torture and more) averages among studies at approximately 15%, with the highest rates resulting from child sexual abuse, military combat, and witnessing a family member murdered.
MacLeod argues that inhibition does not take place, but instead is the result of confusion between similar word-pairs like food-tomato and red-strawberry that can lead to errors.