The first efforts to justify the effect were consistent with the understanding of persuasion processes at that time. Hovland and his colleagues introduced a program of research to study how recall of the message and the source persuaded the sleeper effect. They first hypothesized that message receivers forget the noncredible communicator as time goes by, and therefore the initial message rejection diminishes.[10] Nevertheless, they later propositioned that message receivers may not entirely forget the cue, yet the association between the representations of the discounting cue and the message content may fade over time and produce a sleeper effect.[11] These two formulations vary in that (a) forgetting suggests that the traces of the cue disappear or become unavailable in memory over time, while (b) dissociation suggests that cue remains available in memory but is simply less easily retrieved (less accessible) in relation to the topic of communication.[12]