Ancient people can remember Hamburg (Reuters) – less important, because they store also incidental. This is from studies of two Göttinger development psychologists forth, in which they investigated the ability to “Intentional forgetting» in young and elderly subjects. This ability go increasingly lost elderly people, so that they in the short-term memory noted a great deal of important things and left over would allow less space for important, writes the Hamburg weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” in its latest edition. “The ability to forget, is an essential basic function of human memory,” says Marcus Hasselhorn. Hasselhorns research has shown already children between the ages of six to seven years dominate the so-called «directed forgetting», a conscious «clearing of the upper’re». His doctoral student Joerg Behrendt compared the two groups of 20-35-Jährigen and 60 up 75-Jährigen memory: both should remember one after the other different word series, where while the tests suddenly one of this series as a lapse was called and the volunteers should start again from scratch. Finally everything, also the «fallen» series was however queried. It was revealed that the older subjects had redeemed also the one flagged as irrelevant not from her memory – they remembered all the words right and that the same poorly.