Retrieval-induced forgetting in Alzheimer's disease.

It is claimed that Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients show reduced inhibitory processing and this has been put forward as a reason why AD patients make intrusion errors at recall. However, the evidence to date has been equivocal, because non-inhibitory mechanisms can account for the pattern of findings. Recently, however, a paradigm has been developed that is claimed to give a purer measure of inhibitory processing in episodic memory, the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm [Inhibitory Processes in Attention, Memory and Language, Academic Press, San Diego, 1994, p.