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Directed forgetting in working memory

Dames, Hannah; Oberauer, Klaus (2022). Directed forgetting in working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(12):2990-3008.

Abstract

How does the intent to remember or forget information affect working memory (WM)? To explore this question, in four experiments, we gauged the availability of the to-be-forgotten information directly. Participants remembered six words presented sequentially in separate frames. After each word offset, the frame turned either blue or orange, indicating a to-be-remembered or to-be-forgotten word, respectively. In all experiments, consistently poor recognition performance for to-be-forgotten words and facilitation of to-be-remembered words demonstrated that intent has a strong impact on WM. These directed-forgetting effects are remarkably robust: They can be observed when testing the to-be-forgotten words up to four times (Experiment 1, n = 341), for both item and binding memory (Experiment 3, n = 124), and even when information has to be maintained in WM up to 5 s until the memory cue is presented (Experiment 2 + 4, n = 302 + 321). Our study establishes a new method to jointly study the effects of intent on WM content for both relevant and irrelevant information and provides evidence for directed forgetting in WM. Our research suggests that a combination of two processes causes directed forgetting in WM: One process reduces memory strength of earlier memory representations as a function of subsequently encoded events. Another process rapidly encodes or boosts memory strength only when the person intends to remember that information.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Psychology
Dewey Decimal Classification:150 Psychology
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Social Sciences & Humanities > General Psychology
Life Sciences > Developmental Neuroscience
Uncontrolled Keywords:Developmental Neuroscience, General Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Language:English
Date:1 December 2022
Deposited On:02 Dec 2022 09:17
Last Modified:28 Jan 2025 02:36
Publisher:American Psychological Association
ISSN:0096-3445
OA Status:Green
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001256
PubMed ID:35696174
Project Information:
  • Funder: Swiss Confederation
  • Grant ID:
  • Project Title:
  • Funder: German Academic Exchange Service
  • Grant ID:
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