"selective memory" meaning in English

See selective memory in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} selective memory (uncountable)
  1. (neurology, psychology) The ability to retrieve certain facts and events but not others. Tags: uncountable
    Sense id: en-selective_memory-en-noun-rdMfetKW Categories (other): Neurology, Psychology Topics: human-sciences, medicine, neurology, neuroscience, psychology, sciences
  2. (psychology) An ability to remember some facts while apparently forgetting others, especially when they are inconvenient, embarrassing, or disadvantageous. Tags: uncountable Related terms: cherry-picking, hiding the ball
    Sense id: en-selective_memory-en-noun-oz3eszo6 Categories (other): Psychology, English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 32 68 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 14 86 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 11 89 Topics: human-sciences, psychology, sciences
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        "(psychology) An ability to remember some facts while apparently forgetting others, especially when they are inconvenient, embarrassing, or disadvantageous."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-01-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-01-01 using wiktextract (d1270d2 and 9905b1f). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.