Temporarily Unavailable: Memory Inhibition in Cognitive and Computer Science

Inhibition can take place at the level of neurotransmitters in the synaptic cleft, neurons can inhibit each other's fire rate, it can be s h own at a physiological level - for instance by measuring the EEG, and finally it can be investigated on a purely behavioral level. Behavioral inhibition typically means something like'making a content/action less accessible or suppressing it altogether' in order to enhance processing of relevant information . In cognition, thus, the concept of inhibition implies cognitive mechanisms that actively lower currently irrelevant or inter fering information. Psychological theories that posit the existence of inhibitory mechanisms in our mind have elicited much research across diverse fields of C ognitive P sychology like perception, attention, action control, and memory but have also been tra nsferred to other research fields like D evelopmental P sychology as, fo r instance, understanding the aging brain or the developing brain is closely linked to understanding how the brain handles irrelevant or interfering information - that is how or whether the brain can inhibit such information. The two areas in Cognitive Psychology in which inhibition is traditionally investigated to the largest extent are the research fields of attention and memory. In attention research, typically the interference due to distracting stimuli or actions is analyzed in experimental paradigms that try to tap a specific form of cognitive inhibition. For example, in the Negative Priming task (for a review, Frings, Schneider, & Fox, 2015) it is typically analyzed how an irrelevant distractor stimulus is inhibited. In the cuing task that elicits the inhibition of return effect (Posner, Choate, Rafal, & Vaughn, 1985) it is typically analyzed how an irrelevant location is inhibited. In task switchin g (Kiesel et al., 2010) lowering competition by a just previously performed task while currently executing a novel task is achieved by inhibiting that previous task.