Topic: retroactive interference

Early episodic and contextual memories are forgotten despite their distinct impact on personality development and future behaviour. This phenomenon, termed infantile amnesia, is widely seen in humans and is conserved across other altricial species. In previous years it has become evident that infant memories are stored through the plasticity of neuronal ensembles, forming engrams that remain present in the brain in a latent state once forgotten. Recently, it has been shown that alterations in brain development caused by maternal immune activation (MIA) lead to infant memory retention in male o

Consecutive training on different movement sequences performed with the same motor effectors often leads to retroactive interference - obstructing memory for the initially trained sequence but not for the second. However, in the context of hippocampal-system dependent memories, a poor learning experience, one whose behavioral effects would soon decay, can be enhanced if temporally paired with a ‘strong’, consolidation-triggering, experience. The Synaptic Tagging and Capture hypothesis (STC) explains this paradoxical enhancement by suggesting that synapses specifically engaged in a ‘weak’ learn