Question

Once Neal left home for college, he found that the street names of his childhood neighborhood, and even the names of his old classmates, became difficult to recall. What type of forgetting has affected Neal?

Answer 1

Neal is experiencing transience, a type of forgetting where memory fades over time due to storage decay, leading to difficulty in recalling street names and classmates' names from his childhood neighborhood.

Step-by-step explanation:

The type of forgetting that has affected Neal is known as transience, which refers to the gradual fading of memory traces as time passes. This form of memory loss is a normal part of the forgetting process and is due, in part, to storage decay. As Neal does not frequently recall the street names and classmates from his past, the memories become less accessible over time. This is comparable to how someone may struggle to remember the plot of a book they haven't read in years, despite remembering they enjoyed it. Transience emphasizes that without regular use or rehearsal, our access to stored memories can diminish, although the information was once well-encoded and stored in long-term memory.