BBC News – Repeated remembering ‘wipes similar memories’
As far as I can tell, these research findings is implicit in arguments I have been making about the dispositional nature of memories: i.e., we do not have memories in the sense that we store representations of experienced events and then recall them with some sort of consciously-mediated search function.
We do however embody dispositional enablings that are able to generate new experiences based on networks laid down by experiences . These networks can be invoked by both internal and external events and these networks can then respond with patterns of neural activities reiterating 'events that have happened to us'. These reiterations are not recollections, they are reincarnations.
They can be as much a source of 'new memories' as so-called actual events - in the sense that they can also establish complexes of conditioned responses that we thereafter 'recall'.
When such recalls are repeatedly invoked it is not surprising that relevant conditioned responses are extinguished.