Forgetting occurs due to the collective influence of psychological, biological, social, information-related, and environmental factors. Psychological factors like encoding failure, lack of attention, interference, and disuse are major causes of forgetting. Biological factors include damage from injury, disease, drugs, or aging that obstruct neural networks involved in memory. Social factors like level of social interaction and collective forgetting also influence forgetting. The nature of the information, such as meaninglessness or lack of interest, contributes to forgetting. Environmental contexts different from the learning context, such as changes in place or physical location, can also lead to forgetting.

1. Factors Leading to Forgetting
Dr Rajesh Verma
Assistant Professor in Psychology
Govt. College Adampur, Hisar (Haryana)

2. Meaning
Literary meaning – Fails to remember.
Meaning in psychological parlance – Inability to
recall stored
information in
to the present
state of mind.

3. Definition
According to Bhatia, “Forgetting is the failure of
the individual to revive in consciousness an idea or group
of ideas without the help of the original stimuli”.
According to Drever (1952) “Forgetting means
failure at any time
to recall experience,
when attempting to
do so, or to perform
an action previously
learnt”.

4. Introduction
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1913) pioneered the
study of ‘forgetting’. He created nonsense
syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant)
(meaningless words) to test his memory. Out of
his experiments on himself he drew a curve
which is
famously
called as
‘Forgetting
Curve’.

5. Factors Leading to Forgetting
Forgetting is not caused by an individual factor
rather it is the handiwork of collective effort of several
factors.
(i) Psychological
factors,
(ii) Biological factors,
(iii) Social factors,
(iv) Factors related to
nature of Information,
(v) Environmental
factors.

6. (i) Psychological Factors – Most of the forgetting
occurs due to psychological factors. The forgetting that
occurs due to psychological factors is termed as
Psychological Amnesia. These are: -
(a) Encoding failure,
(b) Storage failure,
(c) Motivational
forgetting (Suppression
is conscious form of
forgetting while
Repression is
unconscious form),

7. (d) Dearth of adequate cognitive processing, attention,
focus,
(e) Disuse,
(f) Lack & Delay
in rehearsal,
(g) Interference,
(h) Improper or
lack of consolidation,
(i) Lack of
Context.

8. (ii) Biological factors – Memory is subdomain of
cognitive system which is maintained and managed by
neural networks. The obstruction of any type in these
neural networks can leads to forgetting. The obstructions
can be of following types: -
(a) Damage due
to injury,
(b) Damage due
to infection or
disease,

9. (c) Obstruction due to mental health issues,
(d) Damage due to drug overdose,
(e) Damage due to trauma,
(f) Natural decay
due to aging,
(g) Lack of
physical activity
and proper diet.

10. (iii) Social factors – Forgetting is opposite to memory
where memory is social process and social interaction
influences memory (Barber & Mather, 2013).
Therefore, social factors also facilitate forgetting.
(a) Level of interpersonal relations,
(b) Level of social interaction,
(c) Interaction and
gender (interaction with
same gender facilitate
forgetting while with
different gender inhibits
forgetting (Barber &
Mathra, 2013),
(d) Collective forgetting.

11. (iv) Factors related to nature of Information – The nature
of information learned also influences forgetting. The
meaningful items are likely to be remembered longer than
the meaningless information.
(a) Information of
non-interest,
(b) Information learned
forcefully,
(c) Meaninglessness of
information,
(d) Novelty of information,
(e) Emotion provoking ability of information,
(f) Autobiographical Information,
(g) Level of abstractness in information,
(h) Style of presentation of information [written, spoken,
sung etc.].

12. (v) Environmental factors – The forgetting is
also influenced by the factors of immediate
environment [physical surroundings].
(a) External context such as place, smell,
situations, sound etc.
(b) Shifting of
physical locations
(Radvansky et al.
2010).

13. References:
1. NCERT, XI Psychology Text book.
2. Beiner, Guy (2018). Forgetful Remembrance: Social
Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in
Ulster. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198749356.
3. Brown, J. (1958).
Some tests of the decay
theory of immediate memory.
Quarterly Journal of
Experimental psychology,
10, 12-21.

14. vermasujit@yahoo.com
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