What’s on the Forgetting poster
A 5-row table: Theory · Claims.
Competing accounts of why memories become inaccessible.
- Trace decay — Memory fades without rehearsal
- Proactive interference — Old learning disrupts new
- Retroactive interference — New learning disrupts old
- Retrieval failure — The cue is missing, not the memory
- Motivated forgetting — Repression — poorly evidenced
Encoding specificity: recall is best when the retrieval context matches the encoding context. Cue-dependent forgetting is the largest effect.
Questions about the Forgetting poster
- What’s on the Forgetting poster?
- A 5-row table: Theory · Claims. Competing accounts of why memories become inaccessible. Trace decay — Memory fades without rehearsal; Proactive interference — Old learning disrupts new; Retroactive interference — New learning disrupts old; Retrieval failure — The cue is missing, not the memory; Motivated forgetting — Repression — poorly evidenced. Encoding specificity: recall is best when the retrieval context matches the encoding context. Cue-dependent forgetting is the largest effect.
- Who is the Forgetting poster for?
- Forgetting belongs to the Psychology section rather than to a school year, because life science is not something one grade owns. Anyone learning cognitive can pin it up — a beginner, a student mid-course, or someone revising years later.
- When should you use the Forgetting poster?
- Interference and retrieval failure are the two best supported. Decay alone explains little. A wall chart earns its place by being glanceable from where the work is happening, so Forgetting belongs on the wall where that life science work actually happens, within glancing distance, rather than filed away.
- What other posters go with Forgetting?
- Attention, Cognitive Load and Decision Making sit alongside Forgetting in the Psychology section. Printed together they make a wall rather than a single sheet, which is how a reference set actually gets used.AttentionCognitive LoadDecision Making
- Is the Forgetting poster free to download and print?
- Yes. Forgetting downloads as a free PDF with no account, no email and no watermark, like everything else in the Psychology section. Print as many copies as you like for a home, a classroom, a library or a tutoring group; reselling the file is the only thing the licence rules out.Read the licence
- What size does the Forgetting poster print at?
- Forgetting is a vector PDF laid out for US Letter, and prints on A4 with Fit to page — the same file, no separate download. Because every mark on it is drawn rather than photographed, it stays sharp enlarged to A3, A2 or A1 at a copy shop. Colour carries emphasis only, so a greyscale print of Forgetting loses nothing.Printing guide
Related posters
Charts that sit alongside Forgetting on the same wall.
Browse every Psychology poster, or start from the full catalogue.