McGeoch, J. A. (1932). Forgetting and the law of disuse. Psychological Review, 39(4), 352-370.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0069819
The thesis is advanced that the law of disuse cannot account for the major phenomena of forgetting; first, because it lacks generality, since disuse often fails to produce forgetting; second, because even where forgetting and disuse are correlated, there is no evidence that it was the disuse that caused the forgetting, instead of other important factors which were present; third, because the principle of passive decay has no analogue anywhere else in science, and is illogical; and fourth, that experimental work with retroactive inhibition shows that forgetting varies with interpolated conditions rather than with disuse. Two principles are offered to account for forgetting: interpolated activities and altered stimulating conditions. Disuse is important only in that it gives these primary laws an opportunity to operate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)