How Forgetting Fosters Heuristic Inference

The notion that forgetting serves an adaptive function has repeatedly been put forth in the history of the analysis of human memory. Bjork and Bjork (1996), for instance, have argued that it prevents obsolete information from interfering with the recall of more current information. Here we explore functions that forgetting may play in memory-based inference strategies. To this end, we bring together two research programs—the program on fast and frugal heuristics (Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC research group, 1999) and the ACT-R research program (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998). Specifically, we implement in ACT-R the recognition heuristic (RH) (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002), and the fluency heuristic (FH), each of which exploit fundamental memory retrieval processes.