Helen has a six-month "gap" in her memories of grade school.Her "gap" corresponds to the period immediately after her father's death.Helen's memory loss is most likely accounted for by

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Helen's memory loss is likely due to repression, which is a defense mechanism that prevents traumatic memories from entering conscious awareness. The period immediately after her father's death was likely a difficult and traumatizing time for Helen, hence her brain may have repressed those memories as a way of protecting her psyche. Cue-dependent forgetting refers to the inability to recall information without cues, retroactive inhibition refers to the interference of newly learned information with the recall of previously learned information, and decay of memory traces refers to the natural fading of memories over time, but none of these fully explain the specific circumstances of Helen's memory loss.

Helen Has a Six-Month "Gap" in Her Memories of Grade