TY - JOUR
T1 - Intentional forgetting diminishes memory for continuous events
AU - Fawcett, Jonathan M.
AU - Taylor, Tracy L.
AU - Nadel, Lynn
N1 - Funding Information:
Address correspondence to: Jonathan M. Fawcett, Dalhousie University, Department of Psychology, Halifax, NS, CANADA, B3H 4J1. E-mail: [email protected] We would like to thank Thanh Luu for his help collecting data and Siobhan Hoscheidt for her assistance with the ethical review process. We would also like to thank PsycheTruth for permission to include screen shots of their video ‘‘How To Clean A Fish Tank or Aquarium, Remove Algae, Pet Care’’ (referred to in-text as ‘‘Cleaning a Fish Tank’’). JMF would further like to thank Dr Lynn Nadel and the University of Arizona for hosting him throughout this project during which he was funded by an NSERC Canadian Graduate Scholarship with a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement and then by a Killam Predoctoral Scholarship. This research was supported by funding from NSERC to TLT.
PY - 2013/8
Y1 - 2013/8
N2 - In a novel event method directed forgetting task, instructions to Remember (R) or Forget (F) were integrated throughout the presentation of four videos depicting common events (e.g., baking cookies). Participants responded more accurately to cued recall questions (E1) and true/false statements (E2-4) regarding R segments than F segments. This was true even when forced to attend to F segments by virtue of having to perform concurrent discrimination (E2) or conceptual segmentation (E3) tasks. The final experiment (E5) demonstrated a larger R >F difference for specific true/false statements (the woman added three cups of flour) than for general true/false statements (the woman added flour) suggesting that participants likely encoded and retained at least a general representation of the events they had intended to forget, even though this representation was not as specific as the representation of events they had intended to remember.
AB - In a novel event method directed forgetting task, instructions to Remember (R) or Forget (F) were integrated throughout the presentation of four videos depicting common events (e.g., baking cookies). Participants responded more accurately to cued recall questions (E1) and true/false statements (E2-4) regarding R segments than F segments. This was true even when forced to attend to F segments by virtue of having to perform concurrent discrimination (E2) or conceptual segmentation (E3) tasks. The final experiment (E5) demonstrated a larger R >F difference for specific true/false statements (the woman added three cups of flour) than for general true/false statements (the woman added flour) suggesting that participants likely encoded and retained at least a general representation of the events they had intended to forget, even though this representation was not as specific as the representation of events they had intended to remember.
KW - Cognition
KW - Events
KW - Intentional forgetting
KW - Memory
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84880954396&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/09658211.2012.748078
DO - 10.1080/09658211.2012.748078
M3 - Article
C2 - 23301998
AN - SCOPUS:84880954396
SN - 0965-8211
VL - 21
SP - 675
EP - 694
JO - Memory
JF - Memory
IS - 6
ER -