Oh, Honey, I Already Forgot That : Strategic Control of Directed Forgetting in Older and Younger Adults*
TL;DR: Two experiments investigated list-method directed forgetting with older and younger adults and showed that age-related differences in directed forgetting occurred because older adults were less likely than younger adults to initiate a strategy to attempt to forget.
Abstract: This article is about age-related differences in intentional forgetting of unwanted information. Imagine receiving medication and reading the directions on how to take it. Afterwards, the doctor tells you to take a different dosage at a different time from that printed on the label. Updating the directions may necessitate intentional forgetting of the earlier-learned information. The current article took one approach to examining this issue by examining age differences in the effectiveness of intentional forgetting using the popular list-method directed forgetting procedure invented by R. A. Bjork, LaBerge, and LeGrand (1968).
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TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the ability to intentionally regulate conscious awareness of unwanted memories through inhibitory control declines with age, highlighting differences in memory control that may be of clinical relevance in the aftermath of unpleasant life events.
Abstract: People often encounter reminders to memories that they would prefer not to think about. When this happens, they often try to exclude the unwanted memory from awareness, a process that relies upon inhibitory control. We propose that the ability to regulate awareness of unwanted memories through inhibition declines with advancing age. In two experiments, we examined younger and older adults’ ability to intentionally suppress retrieval when repeatedly confronted with reminders to an experience they were instructed to not think about. Older adults exhibited significantly less forgetting of the suppressed items compared to younger adults on a later independent probe test of recall, indicating that older adults failed to inhibit the to-be-avoided memories. These findings demonstrate that the ability to intentionally regulate conscious awareness of unwanted memories through inhibitory control declines with age, highlighting differences in memory control that may be of clinical relevance in the aftermath of unpleasant life events.
100 citations
Cites background or result from "Oh, Honey, I Already Forgot That : ..."
...This finding may differ from that reported by Sahakyan et al. (2008) with the directed forgetting procedure, perhaps because the Think/No-Think task confronts participants with strong cues to well learned responses that may create a more challenging control task....
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...…indicates that older adults sometimes are less able to intentionally forget a first list of memory items when given an instruction to forget followed by a second list (Sahakyan et al., 2008; Zacks, Radvanksy, & Hasher, 1996; however, see Zellner & Bäuml, 2006; Sego, Goldin, & Gottlob, 2006)....
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...It remains unclear, however, whether the reduced forgetting for older adults observed in the directed forgetting procedure reflects an inhibition deficit, or a tendency, on the part of older adults, to simply not try to forget because they feel they do not need to (Sahakyan et al., 2008)....
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TL;DR: Results of two experiments support a context-change account of the amnesic effects of daydreaming, which suggests that daydreams that are more different from the current moment will result in more forgetting than daydreamed that are less different fromThe current moment.
Abstract: Daydreaming mentally transports people to another place or time. Many daydreams are similar in content to the thoughts that people generate when they intentionally try to forget. Thus, thoughts like those generated during daydreaming can cause forgetting of previously encoded events. We conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that daydreams that are more different from the current moment (e.g., in distance, time, or circumstance) will result in more forgetting than daydreams that are less different from the current moment, because they result in a greater contextual shift. Daydreaming was simulated in the laboratory via instructions to engage in a diversionary thought. Participants learned a list of words, were asked to think about autobiographical memories, and then learned a second list of words. They tended to forget more words from the first list when they thought about their parents' home than when they thought about their current home (Experiment 1). They also tended to forget more when they thought about an international vacation than when they thought about a domestic vacation (Experiment 2). These results support a context-change account of the amnesic effects of daydreaming.
99 citations
TL;DR: The authors provide an up-to-date review of the twenty-first century research and theory on list-method directed forgetting (DF) and related phenomena like the context-change effect.
Abstract: The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide an up-to-date review of the twenty-first century research and theory on list-method directed forgetting (DF) and related phenomena like the context-change effect. Many researchers have assumed that DF is diagnostic of inhibition, but we argue for an alternative, noninhibitory account and suggest reinterpretation of earlier findings. We first describe what DF is and the state of the art with regard to measuring the effect. Then, we review recent evidence that brings DF into the family of effects that can be explained by global memory models. The process-based theory we advocate is that the DF impairment arises from mental context change and that the DF benefits emerge mainly but perhaps not exclusively from changes in encoding strategy. We review evidence (some new to this paper) that strongly suggests that DF arises from the engagement of controlled forgetting strategies that are independent of whether people believed the forget cue or not. Then we describe the vast body of literature supporting that forgetting strategies result in contextual change effects, as well as point out some inconsistencies in the DF literature that need to be addressed in future research. Next, we provide evidence—again, some of it new to this chapter—that the reason people show better memory after a forget cue is that they change encoding strategies. In addition to reviewing the basic research with healthy population, we reinterpret the evidence from the literature on certain clinical populations, providing a critique of the work done to date and outlining ways of improving the methodology for the study of DF in special populations. We conclude with a critical discussion of alternative approaches to understanding DF.
76 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used the item-method of directed forgetting and obtained greater directed forgetting for VTs than SPTs, but only in the primacy region for SPTs.
70 citations
Cites background from "Oh, Honey, I Already Forgot That : ..."
...…investigations of directed forgetting have also taken this approach (e.g., Bäuml et al., 2008; Pastötter & Bäuml, 2007; Sahakyan & Delaney, 2005; Sahakyan & Goodmon, 2007; Sahakyan et al., 2008; Zellner & Bäuml, 2006).1 Unless otherwise specified, the results were significant at a = .05 level....
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...Recent investigations of directed forgetting have also taken this approach (e.g., Bäuml et al., 2008; Pastötter & Bäuml, 2007; Sahakyan & Delaney, 2005; Sahakyan & Goodmon, 2007; Sahakyan et al., 2008; Zellner & Bäuml, 2006)....
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TL;DR: Age effects were reliably larger when the item method was used, suggesting that these effects are mainly due to encoding differences.
Abstract: In this meta-analysis, we examined the effects of aging on directed forgetting. A cue to forget is more effective in younger (d = 1.17) than in older (d = 0.81) adults. Directed-forgetting effects were larger (a) with the item method rather than with the list method, (b) with longer presentation times, (c) with longer postcue rehearsal times, (d) with single words rather than with verbal action phrases as stimuli, (e) with shorter lists, and (f) when recall rather than recognition was tested. Age effects were reliably larger when the item method was used, suggesting that these effects are mainly due to encoding differences.
60 citations
References
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TL;DR: This article evaluated intentional forgetting in adults with characteristics of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in a task of list-method intentional forgetting, and found that participants in the non-ADHD group demonstrated successful intentional forgetting and seemed to encode items using item-specific processing and relational processing.
26 citations
"Oh, Honey, I Already Forgot That : ..." refers background in this paper
...Other populations also show reduced directed forgetting, such as frontal lobe patients (e.g., Conway & Fthenaki, 2003), adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (e.g., White & Marks, 2004), and children (e.g., Harnishfeger & Pope, 1996)....
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, a list-method directed-forgetting task was used to explore the relationship between working memory capacity and interference in a group of participants varying in WM capacity, and the results showed that interference was increased by introducing a memory load between the to-be-forgotten and the to be-remembered list.
Abstract: Recent research has shown that the ability to inhibit irrelevant information is
related to Working Memory (WM) capacity. In three experiments, we
explored this relationship by using a list-method directed-forgetting task
(DF) in participants varying in WM capacity. Contrary to predictions, in
Experiment 1, DF effects were only found for participants with low WM
capacity, whereas high WM capacity participants did not show this effect.
This unexpected pattern of results was explained as due to the differential
susceptibility to interference of high and low span participants. In
Experiments 2 and 3, interference was increased by introducing a memory
load between the to-be-forgotten and the to-be-remembered list (Experiment
2) and by increasing the list length (Experiment 3). In these conditions of
high interference, the pattern of results was reversed so that DF effects were
obtained for the high span group and they were not present for the low span
group. The reversal of the effect for the high and low WM capacity group
depending on the degree of interference suggests that inhibition in the DF
procedure depends on both: the degree of interferencparticipants, and the availability of controlled resources
22 citations
TL;DR: Positive global beliefs about memory and aging may be present even when such global beliefs contradict item-specific judgments and personal beliefs about one's own cognition.
Abstract: This study deals with beliefs about question-answering processes involving “world knowledge” utilized by young, middle aged, and older adults. Questions intended to induce either fact retrieval or inferential reasoning were shown to younger (n = 37), middle aged (n = 37) and older (n = 37) adults in both a multiple choice and true/false format. Increasing age level was not related to decreased confidence in either fact retrieval or inferential reasoning. Global assessments about these question-answering processes involving “people in general” and self evaluations were taken from the same individuals. In contrast to personal confidence ratings, adults of all ages generally believed in declining fact retrieval abilities in old age. Inferential reasoning, however, often was believed to remain stable or even increase in ability level with increasing age. This was especially true in the assessments generated by older adults and in self evaluations. Thus, negative global beliefs about memory and aging ...
14 citations
"Oh, Honey, I Already Forgot That : ..." refers background in this paper
...It is known that older adults have negative stereotypes about the effects of aging on memory (Camp & Pignatiello, 1988; Hertzog & Hultsch, 2000; Hummert, 1990; Kite & Johnson, 1988; Lineweaver & Hertzog, 1998; Ryan, 1992), and believe that they will perform more poorly on memory tests compared to…...
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