Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a paradigm where re-peated study and cue-based retrieval of words impair retrievalof related, but unstudied, words. We present a process model,situated in the ACT-R/E cognitive architecture, that accountsfor the RIF task using the architecture’s overarching theory ofassociative learning. In this theory, studying words strengthenstheir association with their related cues; this, in turn, weakensthe association between those cues and any other words theyare related to. We show this account fits a recent dataset thatexplores cueing in the RIF task (Perfect et al., 2004).