3-38  Retrieval Failure  Fading  Interference  Repression or Suppression  Retention of Learning  Praise Stimulates Remembering  Recall Is Promoted by Association  Favorable Attitudes Aid Retention  People learn and remember only what they wish to know. Without motivation there is little chance for recall. The most effective  motivation is based on positive or rewarding objectives.  As discussed earlier, each bit of information or action, which is associated with something to be learned, tends to facilitate its later  recall by the learner. Unique or disassociated facts tend to be forgotten unless they are of special interest or application.  Responses that give a pleasurable return tend to be repeated. Absence of praise or recognition tends to discourage, and any form of  negativism in the acceptance of a response tends to make its recall less likely.  Teach thoroughly and with meaning. Material thoroughly learned is highly resistant to forgetting. This is suggested by experimental  studies and it also was pointed out in the sections on skill learning. Meaningful learning builds patterns of relationships in the  learner’s consciousness, which is one reason to conduct SBT. In contrast, rote learning is superficial and is not easily retained.  Meaningful learning goes deep because it involves principles and concepts anchored in the learner’s own experiences. The following  discussion emphasizes five principles, which are generally accepted as having a direct application to remembering.  Each of the theories of forgetting implies that when a person forgets something, it is not actually lost. Rather, it is simply unavailable  for recall. The instructor’s problem is how to make certain that the learner’s learning is readily available for recall. The following  suggestions can help.  Forgetting information does not mean it is gone forever. Sometimes it is still there, just inaccessible.  Freudian psychology advances the view that some forgetting is caused by repression or suppression. In repression or suppression, a  memory is pushed out of reach because the individual does not want to remember the feelings associated with it. Repression is an  unconscious form of forgetting while suppression is a conscious form.  Interference theory suggests that people forget something because a certain experience has overshadowed it, or that the learning of  similar things has intervened. This theory might explain how the range of experiences after graduation from school causes a person to  forget or to lose knowledge. In other words, new events displace many things that had been learned. From experiments, at least two  conclusions about interference may be drawn. First, similar material seems to interfere with memory more than dissimilar material;  and second, material not well learned suffers most from interference.  On the other hand, experimental studies show that a hypnotized person can describe specific details of an event, which normally is  beyond recall. Apparently the memory is there, locked in the recesses of the mind. The difficulty is summoning the memory to  consciousness or retrieving the link that leads to it.  The theory of fading or decay suggests that a person forgets information that is not used for an extended period of time, that it fades  away or decays. It had been suggested that humans are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears  pertinent.  Retrieval failure is simply the inability to retrieve information, that tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon when a person knows the meaning  of a word, or the answer to a question, but cannot retrieve it. It is also caused by the fact that sometimes people simply do not encode  information well and the information never makes it to LTM or is lost before it can attach itself to the LTM. This is sometimes  referred to as failure to store. 