Memory inhibition

In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information.

Version

v1 · 2026-09-28 · History

Domain-specific #

10663

Domain group

Social Sciences

Origin domain

Psychology & Behavioral Sciences

Subdomains

Cognitive Inhibition, Cognitive Psychology → Psychology & Behavioral Sciences

Core Idea

Memory inhibition is treated here as the recurring cognitive inhibition identity summarized by this source-grounded definition: In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information. In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information. The scientific concept of memory inhibition should not be confused with everyday uses of the word "inhibition". Scientifically speaking, memory inhibition is a type of cognitive inhibition, which is the stopping or overriding of a mental process, in whole or in part, with or without intention.

Scope of Application

• Hasher and Zacks' inhibition account of aging. 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.

• Retrieval-induced forgetting. Retrieval-practice phase: Participants are cued to practice remembering some of the exemplars given the category cue (e.g.

• Retrieval-induced forgetting. Anderson and Spellman observed that items that shared a semantic relationship with practiced information was less recallable.

• Retrieval-induced forgetting. Using the example from above, recall of items related to practiced information, including tomato and strawberry was lower than recall for cracker, even though strawberry is part of a different pair.

• Retrieval-induced forgetting. Though Anderson & Green's (2001) results have been replicated several times, a group of prominent psychology researchers using the same methodology as the original study were unable to replicate even the basic.

Clarity

A clear use of Memory inhibition names the carrier, the operative relation, and the conditions under which the source treats the identity as present. The minimal definition is In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information. The strongest recognition evidence in the frozen account is: Research on a wide variety of psychological processes, including attention, perception, learning and memory, psycholinguistics, cognitive development, aging, learning disabilities, and.

Manages Complexity

Memory inhibition compresses multiple cognitive inhibition details into a stable diagnostic relation. The source shows both the central mechanism—arguing for a different explanation, Wundt (1902) claimed that selective attention was accomplished by the active inhibition of unattended information, and that to attend to one of several simultaneous stimuli, the others had to be inhibited.—and the practical consequence—the "part-set cuing effect" was initially discovered by Slamecka (1968), who.

Abstract Reasoning

1. Type the carrier. Identify the cognitive inhibition entities to which the claim applies.
2. State the relation. Use the source-grounded identity: In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information.
3. Check operation and conditions. In the face of behaviorism during the late 1920s through the 1950s, and through the early growth of cognitive psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, inhibition largely disappeared as a theory.
4. Demand recognition evidence.

Knowledge Transfer

Within the home domain. Knowledge about Memory inhibition transfers literally when a new case preserves the same carrier type, relation, and recognition test. 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. Retrieval-practice phase: Participants are cued to practice remembering some of the exemplars given the category cue (e.g. Beyond the home domain. No canonical parent is asserted for Memory inhibition.

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space

Memory inhibition sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (78^th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.

Family — Social Cognition & Perception (13 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

• Cocktail party effect — 0.88
• Efficient coding hypothesis — 0.82
• Eye contact — 0.82
• Subitizing — 0.82
• Free recall — 0.82

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-08