Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting Quotes

“Becoming maximally sophisticated as a learner is, in a sense, not enough. Becoming a truly effective learner also requires an appreciation of one’s capacity to learn and a commitment to the proposition that one’s learning is under one’s control.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“The Importance of Becoming Metacognitively Sophisticated as a Learner Whatever the reasons for our not developing accurate mental models of ourselves as learners, the importance of becoming sophisticated as a learner cannot be overemphasized. Increasingly, coping with the changes that characterize today’s world—technological changes, job and career changes, and changes in how much of formal and informal education happens in the classroom versus at a computer terminal, coupled with the range of information and procedures that need to be acquired—requires that we learn how to learn. Also, because more and more of our learning will be what Whitten, Rabinowitz, and Whitten (2006) have labeled unsupervised learning, we need, in effect, to know how to manage our own learning activities. To become effective in managing one’s own learning requires not only some understanding of the complex and unintuitive processes that underlie one’s encoding, retention, and retrieval of information and skills, but also, in my opinion, avoiding certain attribution errors. In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) refers to the tendency, in explaining the behaviors of others, to overvalue the role of personality characteristics and undervalue the role of situational factors. That is, behaviors tend to be overattributed to a behaving individual’s or group’s characteristics and underattributed to situational constraints and influences. In the case of human metacognitive processes, there is both a parallel error and an error that I see as essentially the opposite. The parallel error is to overattribute the degree to which students and others learn or remember to innate ability. Differences in ability between individuals are overappreciated, whereas differences in effort, encoding activities, and whether the prior learning that is a foundation for the new learning in question has been acquired are underappreciated.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“Also, if we think of human memory as akin to the memory in a manmade device of some kind, we are unlikely to appreciate the extent to which retrieving information from our memory increases the subsequent accessibility of that information and reduces the accessibility of competing information. Retrieving information from a compact disc or computer memory leaves the status of that information and related information unperturbed. More globally, we may fail to appreciate the volatility that characterizes access to information from our memories as conditions change, events intervene, and new learning happens. Recent findings (Koriat, Bjork, Sheffer, & Bar, 2004; Kornell & Bjork, 2009) suggest that learners are susceptible to what Kornell and Bjork have termed a stability bias—a tendency to think that access to information in memory will remain stable across a retention interval or additional study opportunities.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“Why We Develop Faulty Mental Models of Ourselves as Learners It is very puzzling, in fact, that as lifelong users of our memories and learning capabilities, we do not end up with a more accurate mental model of how we learn, or fail to learn. Why is it, in short, that we are not educated by the “trials and errors of everyday living and learning” (R. A. Bjork, 1999, p. 455)? One consideration is that the functional architecture of how humans forget, remember, and learn is unlike the corresponding processes in man-made devices. Most of us do not, of course, understand the engineering details of how information is stored, added, lost, or overwritten in man-made devices, such as a computer or video recorder, but the functional architecture of such systems is simpler and more understandable than is the complex architecture of human learning and memory. To the extent, for example, that we do think of ourselves as working like such devices, we become prone to assuming that exposing ourselves to information and procedures will lead to storage (i.e., recording) of such information or procedures in our memories—that the information will write itself in one’s memory, so to speak.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“Consistent with research on generation effects (e.g., deWinstanley, Bjork, & Bjork, 1996; Hirshman & Bjork, 1988; Slamecka & Graf, 1978), there was a very large advantage in later recall—more than two to one—when an item was constructed, rather than simply read. Of special interest, though, are the conditions when an item was studied intact and then, after either 0 or 20 intervening trials on other pairs, either studied again intact or constructed. A repetition after 20 intervening trials had the effects one would expect: a clear benefit of repetition on later cued recall and a substantially greater benefit when the response member had to be constructed rather than simply read. However, when the repetition was essentially immediate, final cued recall profited very little from either an additional study or construct trial. In particular, studying the item intact on one trial and then having to construct it on the next trial produced poorer final recall (42%) than did having only a single construct trial (57%).”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“Solving a Problem Versus Remembering the Solution Another conjecture as to why forgetting enables learning traces to research by Larry Jacoby (1978). The basic idea is that learning has a problem-solving aspect— learners must find encoding or retrieval activities that will make studied materials accessible after a delay—and forgetting between learning trials is necessary for learners to carry out additional such activities. In Jacoby’s experiment, participants were asked to study pairs such as Foot: Shoe and were later tested via cued recall (Foot: ________?).”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“One possibility is illustrated by Estes’s (1955) fluctuation model, which assumes that to-be-learned responses are associated with cues in the environment, only some of which are “sampled” by the learner at any one point in time. Which cues are sampled (“available” in Estes’s terminology) is assumed to fluctuate across time as a function of changes in the learner’s physical, emotional, and cognitive state and changes in the environment itself. Forgetting is then a consequence of more new (unassociated) cues and fewer old (associated) cues being sampled as a retention interval increases. What such forgetting also does, though, is provide additional cues that can be associated to the target response, which results in more total cues being sampled and associated to the target response—that is, more learning, which is assumed to be a function of the percentage of the total population of cues that are associated to the response in question.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“Learning, therefore, contributes to forgetting. As we learn new information, procedures, and skills, we create the potential for competition with related information, skills, and procedures that already exist in memory. Access to that earlier learning can then be inhibited or blocked by related aspects of the newer, and perhaps more accessible, learning.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“As William James (1980) was one of the first to emphasize, “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork

“Robert A. Bjork It is natural for people to think that learning is a matter of building up skills or knowledge in one’s memory, and that forgetting is a matter of losing some of what was built up. From that perspective, learning is a good thing and forgetting is a bad thing. The relationship between learning and forgetting is not, however, so simple, and in certain important respects is quite the opposite: Conditions that produce forgetting often enable additional learning, for example, and learning or recalling some things is a contributor to the forgetting of other things.”
― Aaron S. Benjamin, Successful Remembering and Successful Forgetting: A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Bjork