The effects of delay on objective memory and on the subjective experience of forgetting

TL;DR

The study explores how memory accessibility and subjective experience change over time, finding that while memory quality remains stable, people feel like they forget more as time passes.

Contribution

The study investigates the subjective experience of forgetting contextual memories over time, a topic previously overlooked.

Findings

Memory accessibility declines with delay, but memory quality remains stable.

Subjective memory ratings show significant decline over time despite stable memory quality.

Subjective cues like retrieval effort influence the perception of forgetting.

Abstract

Recent years have seen a revived interest in the study of delay-dependent forgetting, with compelling evidence that episodic memories associated with contextual information are susceptible to delay-dependent forgetting. In addition, studies have shown that while the accessibility of memories associated with contextual information declines over time, there is little or no change in the memories’ precision and quality. Building on these findings, the current study focuses on a fundamental question regarding memories associated with contextual information, which has received scant attention: What is the subjective experience accompanying forgetting of such memories? In two experiments, we found that, in line with previous results, the accessibility of memories associated with contextual information declined following a delay, but there was little or no detrimental effect of time on the quality of the memory representations. In contrast, subjective measures of memory showed substantial decrement over time. These results are interpreted in terms of the cues that drive subjective memory ratings following a delay. Such cues include the effort of retrieval, which increases over time, even when the retrieved representation does not change (or changes only slightly), as well as subjective theories of forgetting, which may not reflect that some aspects of memory show little or no forgetting over time.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-26057-2.

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