Controlling the contents of memory: Intentional forgetting at encoding

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I. BACKGROUND

“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting.\" - Stephen Carpenter

My lab does talk about this.

My students and I are fascinated by intentional forgetting forgetting that people do on purpose to select some items for commitment to long-term memory and to discard others. Our research was the first to demonstrate that intentionally forgetting unwanted information is initially more effortful than intentionally remembering. We have argued that this effort is related to an active withdrawal of attention from to-be-forgotten items that also impairs processing of other nearby items. We have identified individual differences that make some people worse at intentionally forgetting than others, while also showing intentional forgetting to be surprisingly robust across a variety of emotional and neutral stimuli. We have further revealed that when intentional forgetting fails and a long-term memory is formed for unwanted information, the resulting memory trace is different than for items that were meant to be remembered.

II. OBJECTIVES AND APPROACH

We will continue to build on this fruitful program of research by applying methods from the attention and memory literature to study intentional forgetting in young adults. We plan to attain three objectives:

1. Characterize changes in attention to space that occur for mental representations that are formed:

A. Bottom-up (by visual presentation). To do this, we will analyze the movement path that the hands and eyes take when acquiring a visual target that follows an instruction to Remember or Forget.

B. Top-down (by activation of a conceptual association). To do this, we will capitalize on principles of embodied cognition to reveal changes in spatial associations following instructions to Remember and Forget.

2. Characterize changes that occur to the availability of attention over time, rather than in space, following instructions to Remember and Forget.

3. Explore whether intentions to Forget make participants feel more negative about to-be-forgotten items and, if so, whether these evaluations persist long enough to alter subsequent thinking and decision-making.

III. NOVELTY AND SIGNIFICANCE

Central to this research are two problems that are fundamental to all cognitive systems those of selection and representation. Using the memory system as a model cognitive system, we will offer unique insights into how selection for long-term memory is achieved, the level(s) of representation upon which this selection operates, and the consequences of this selection for emotional evaluations. In so doing, our research will generate new knowledge about how memory, attention, motor, and emotion systems interact in normal human cognition to achieve and reflect control over the contents of long-term memory.