Because of personal motives and the architecture of the mind, it may be difficult for people to know themselves. People often attempt to block out unwanted thoughts and feelings through conscious suppression and perhaps through unconscious repression, though whether such attempts are successful is controversial. A more common source of self-knowledge failure is the inaccessibility of much of the mind to consciousness, including mental processes involved in perception, motor learning, personality, attitudes, and self-esteem. Introspection cannot provide a direct pipeline to these mental processes, though some types of introspection may help people construct beneficial personal narratives. Other ways of increasing self-knowledge include looking at ourselves through the eyes of others and observing our own behavior. These approaches can potentially promote self-knowledge, although major obstacles exist. It is not always advantageous to hold self-perceptions that correspond perfectly with reality, but increasing awareness of nonconscious motives and personality is generally beneficial.

Self-Knowledge: Its Limits, Value, and Potential for Improvement

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the causes of memory interference and the extent of situations in which these mechanisms operate. First, the chapter discusses some widely held assumptions about the situation of interference, focusing on the idea that such effects arise from competition for access via a shared retrieval cue. This notion is sufficiently general that it may be applied in a variety of interference settings, which is illustrated briefly. Then the classical interference paradigms from which these ideas emerged are reviewed. The chapter also reviews more recent phenomena that both support and challenge classical conceptions of interference. These phenomena provide compelling illustrations of the generality of interference and, consequently, of the importance of understanding its mechanisms. A recent perspective on interference is highlighted that builds upon insights from modern work, while validating intuitions underlying several of the classical interference mechanisms. According to this new perspective, forgetting derives not from acquiring new memories per se, but from the impact of later retrievals of the newly learned material. After discussing findings from several paradigms that support this retrieval-based view, the chapter illustrates how forgetting might be linked to inhibitory processes underlying selective attention.

Interference and inhibition in memory retrieval.

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In Opposition to Inhibition

Directed forgetting has been studied by instructing Ss to forget either (a) an initial list or (b) individually selected words. Differential encoding was hypothesized to be responsible for word-method directed forgetting, and retrieval inhibition for list-method directed forgetting. In Experiments 1 and 2, directed forgetting was observed in recognition with the word method but not with the list method. Release from directed forgetting occurred in final recall after recognition but only with the list method. These results are interpreted in terms of a theoretical framework that integrates distinctive-relational processing theory with revised generation-recognition theory. In Experiments 1-3, predictions from that framework were generally well supported on implicit and explicit retention tests that provided the same stimulus conditions

Directed forgetting in implicit and explicit memory tests: A comparison of methods.

The authors propose that the costs and benefits of directed forgetting in the list method result from an internal context change that occurs between the presentations of 2 lists in response to a “forget” instruction. In Experiment 1 of this study, costs and benefits akin to those found in directed forgetting were obtained in the absence of a forget instruction by a direct manipulation of cognitive context change. Experiment 2 of this study replicated those findings using a different cognitive context manipulation and investigated the effects of context reinstatement at the time of recall. Context reinstatement reduced the memorial costs and benefits of context change in the condition where context had been manipulated and in the standard forget condition. The results are consistent with a context change account of directed forgetting. Directed forgetting is a phenomenon first studied by R. A. Bjork, LaBerge, and LeGrand (1968) whereby people appear to be able to intentionally forget information, making it less accessible to later attempts at recall and reducing interference from that information. The paradigm involves two variations: the item method, which seems to reflect differential encoding of items, and the list method, which does not depend on differential encoding of items (Basden, Basden, & Gargano, 1993). The present work concerns the mechanism of directed forgetting with the list method. Participants are presented two lists of items to study but, immediately after List 1, half of the participants are instructed to forget List 1 (the “forget” group), whereas the remaining half are told to continue remembering List 1 (the “remember” group). The final test requires recall of both lists. Typically, the forget group recalls fewer items from the first list than does the remember group—a finding referred to as the costs of directed forgetting

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lili_Sahakyan/publication/11019652_A_Contextual_Change_Account_of_the_Directed_Forgetting_Effect/links/553949440cf2239f4e7d8f0d.pdf

A contextual change account of the directed forgetting effect.

In three experiments we compared posthypnotic amnesia (PHA) with directed forgetting (DF), evaluating subjects' hypnotic susceptibility, hypnotized or not. Experiment 1 suggested that the memory processes in PHA and DF were not the same. Low and high susceptibility subjects responded differently in the two contexts. Experiment 2 demonstrated a context effect for highly susceptible subjects: They showed the usual DF response outside hypnosis but not during hypnosis. Experiment 3 showed that high and low susceptibility subjects responded similarly to DF instructions outside hypnosis, eliminating the susceptibility as an important variable in the DF response. We concluded: (a) The interaction of context and susceptibility was the important determinant of unusual DF responses for high susceptibles, and (b) information processing concepts are too limited to explain PHA and perhaps DF. Theories that include interactions appear necessary for an accurate understanding of hypnotic phenomena and perhaps some phenomena usually focused on by cognitive psychology.

Gary J. Gargano

Papers

Directed forgetting in implicit and explicit memory tests: A comparison of methods.

Directed forgetting and posthypnotic amnesia: information processing and social contexts.