Forgetting and the learning curve: A laboratory study

The industrial learning curve is widely used to predict costs and labor requirements wherever learning is taking place. Little is known, however, about the reverse of this process: the forgetting that occurs during production interruptions. The ability to estimate cost increases due to forgetting would be useful for economic lot size determinations, bidding on repeat orders, estimating the cost of strikes, and so on. Empirical studies apparently have not been published. Field data are difficult to obtain and easily confounded by extraneous variables. Thus a laboratory experiment was undertaken to test selected variables that should (or should not) affect forgetting.