Forgetting induced by recognition of visual images

Retrieval-induced forgetting is a phenomenon in which groups of stimuli are initially learned, but then a subset of those stimuli are subsequently remembered via retrieval practice, causing the forgetting of other initially learned items. This phenomenon has almost exclusively been studied using linguistic stimuli. The goal of the present study was to determine whether our memory for simultaneously learned visual stimuli was subject to a similar type of memory impairment. Participants were shown real-world objects, then they practised recognizing a subset of these remembered objects, and finally their memory was tested for all learned objects. We found that practising recognition of a subset of items resulted in forgetting of other objects in the group. However, impaired recognition did not spread to new objects belonging to the same category. Our findings have important implications for how our memories operate in real-world tasks, where remembering one object or aspect of a visual scene can cause us to forget other information encoded at the same time.