Listening to a traffic report before leaving for work or school may be part of your daily routine. But how does your brain sort through the entire report and only recall the fastest route to your destination, and then forget that information the next day when listening to a new report? Avery Rizio, a Penn State postdoc in the Language and Aging Lab in the Center for Language Science, and Nancy Dennis, associate professor of psychology, recently published research in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience that demonstrates how forgetting unimportant or outdated information is not accidental, but is an active neurological process.
