Requirements for a companion system to support identifying irrelevancy

Abstract

Though forgetting seems to be an everyday hassle, forgetting information not needed in the current context is helpful, even necessary. Such unneeded information is irrelevant to your current task at best, and at worst, deteriorates performance. For example, when writing a computer program in C#, you should temporarily forget your Java knowledge, since these programming languages are similar but not quite the same. Bjork, Bjork, and Anderson summarize this type of forgetting under the term goal-directed forgetting [1].