Outline two explanations of forgetting in short-term memory and decide which one is better. Present evidence to support your decision.

Forgetting is an inevitable part of life which the majority of us experience on a day to day basis. What we forget is often specific to a particular person; however, it is why we forget which attracts the attention of psychologists. To understand how the memory system works, it is important to look at some of the reasons why we loose information. There are several methods to explain this, one of them being displacement. In …

…this would be the vast amount of theoretical support it possesses from adjacent studies. These include: McKenna and Glendon (1985), Baddeley (1999) and Bahrick and Phelps (1987), which all prove the theory of decay to be effective. Although displacement also has a number of supporting studies, many of them are unable to classify this method as solely responsible for forgetting. This therefore proves to be persuasive factor when trying to determine between the effectiveness of displacement and decay.