The Importance of Temporal Distinctiveness for Forgetting over the Short Term

Rapidly forgetting information once attention is diverted seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon. The cause of this rapid decline has been debated for decades; some researchers claim that memory traces decay as a function of time out of the focus of attention, whereas others claim that prior memory traces cause confusability by interfering with the current trace. Here we demonstrate that performance after a long delay can be better than performance after a short delay if the temporal confusability between the current item and previous items is reduced. These results provide strong evidence for the importance of temporal confusability, rather than decay, as the cause of forgetting over the short term.