Response to Sept 26th reading

There were several things that peaked my interest in the last reading One was the concept of cuing. This concept explains that memories that can seem forgotten forever, can be recovered with the proper cue. Something else that's interesting, is that the stronger the cue, the stronger the memory. For example; If I smell vegetable soup it propels me back to my childhood at some point when I would eat this really good vegetable soup. I can't remember who made it for me, or where I was, but I remember that soup. Now, had the cue been stronger I might have been able to remember all the details of my soup meal, including who made it and where.
Another great point in the reading was the reason people forgot things. In Basic Observations on Remembering Rubin states "Rather than time, changes in the environment and intervening activity have been examined as the causes of forgetting"(pg. 157 Rubin). A little earlier he says this is necessary because time does not explain the minimal loss of memory in oral traditions. I thought this was a very good point for several reasons. It's interesting because one of the biggest reasons I feel like I forget things is time. Why don't I remember that trip to Disneyland when I was 8 with the family? Or one of the countless field trips I took in elementary school? I always thought because as time went on, the memory started to fade. This all seems logical but then it leads to the question of how all of our ancestors could remember story after story to be passed down through there generations for hundreds of years.
This is where Rubin's experiment starts to come in. First of all "activity that reduces recall is termed interference" (pg. 147). There are a couple different types of interference: proactive and retroactive. The first being the interference that takes place before someone remembers something, and retroactive takes place after someone has tried to remember something, but before they try to recall it again. One thing he found was that interference similar to whatever was being remembered gave people a lot more trouble than something that had nothing to do with it. This makes a lot of sense because it becomes very easy to become confused and end up forgetting both the interference, and the original item to be remembered.
There are obviously a myriad of reasons people forget things but it's interesting to know what a few of those reasons are.