Abel and Bäuml’s Article Review
Reviewing articles culminates in a state-of-the-art comprehension of a research topic. Therefore, reviewing articles is essential and should never be questioned. Abel and Bäuml attempted to find out the involvement of inhibition, strength-based blocking, and output interference in both socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting (SS RIF) and within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting (WI RIF) in their 2019 study. The study can help in understanding selective memory retrieval because of its thought-provoking experiments, which suggest that inhibition and strength-based blocking influence both types of RIF and output interference does not forgetting.
Even though not explicitly stated, the researchers’ hypothesis was that blocking, inhibition, and output interference contributed to both SS RIF and WI RIF. The authors tested the hypothesis using four experiments. Experiment 1 used a 2 x 3 mixed-factorial design while experiments 2, 3, and 4 employed the same 2 x 4 mixed-factorial design (Abel & Bäuml, 2019). During the experiments, the participants were expected to recognize specific items that were previously presented to them while being subjected to output interference, inhibition, or blocking. The results suggested that blocking and inhibition contribute to SS RIF in listeners and WI RIF in speakers (Abel & Bäuml, 2019). These outcomes are significant because they can be used to understand the underlying causes of selective forgetting.
Psychologists can use this study to make informed decision about their patients’ mental state. Furthermore, they can repeat the same study to test their theories regarding memory and cognitive mechanisms. In the process, some modification can be made to improve its relevance in psychology. For instance, the study can be improved by combining the experiments to test how the factors influencing both SS RIF and WI RIF function simultaneously in the same sample. Regardless, this article is detailed and present insightful and enlightening information on how speakers’ selective memory retrieval can lead to RIF in listeners.
The article achieves its purpose and determines that only inhibition and blocking can cause RIF in both speakers and listeners. On the other hand, it highlights that output interferences do not contribute to RIF. Even though Abel and Bäuml provide detailed methodologies used for testing its hypothesis and getting the results, their work still offers the impetus for ongoing debate and research on RIF.