(6) Motivated Forgetting Flashcards
What is positivity bias?
Tendency to recall more pleasant memories than either neutral or unpleasant ones
What experiment was conducted to test positivity bias?
- Different images, pleasant, unpleasant and neutral
- Test phase: recall test
- Used 3 groups, young, middle and older participants
- Older adults display better memory for pleasant images than negative images
Why do older adults show preference over more pleasant memories?
- Older: focus shifts from future oriented goals to maintaining sense of well-being
- Emotion regulation – monitor, evaluate, alter, gate (letting in and out our emotional reactions and memories)
- Older adults seem to forget the bad things
Whatv does it mean by repressed memories?
- Defence mechanisms: keep things out of consciousness
- Repression: unconscious blocking of thoughts, feelings and impulses
- Influences behaviour, dream content and emotional reactions
- Have little control over it
- Return of the repressed – popping up of memories
What is the difference between repression and suppression?
- Repression: unconscious and automatic process
- Suppression: conscious, intentional, goal-directed process
What is intentional forgetting?
conscious goal to forget
What is Psychogenic amnesia:
profound forgetting of the events of one’s life
What is Other forgetting?
not accidental, but not consciously intended
What is Signal detection theory?
- Decision making
- Response bias and discriminability
- Response bias: the likeliness of a person saying that a target is a target
- Discriminability: detecting lures and targets
What is directed forgetting?
- Tendency for instruction to forget items to induce memory impairment for those items
1. Item-method directed forgetting
2. List-method directed forgetting
Directed forgetting: item-method
- Differential encoding strategies
- Selective rehearsal hypothesis
- Encoding suppression hypothesis: forgotten items are suppressed
Directed forgetting: list method experiement
- List 1: given a list of words, then told it’s the wrong list and given a new list
- List 2: asked to memorise both lists
- List 2: items recalled better from the second list
- List 1: recall more items from the first list
What is the Retrieval inhibition hypothesis?
- Forget instructions inhibit list 1 items
- reduces the activation of unwanted memories (remain available)
- Re-presenting forgotten items restores their activation levels
- Explains why items can be recognised but not recalled
Context shift hypothesis
- Forget instructions separate list 1 from list 2 items
- Mental context shifts between the lists
- List 2 context lingers into the final test
- New context is a poor retrieval cue for list 1 items
- May involve inhibition of the unwanted context
How do people forget a traumatic event?
- Move to a new town? Change environment? Change the meaning of the event?
- Avoiding reminders prevents retrieval practice and hinders retrieval
- E.g. school shooting – rebuilding school to forget the event
What is Cognitive control?
- The ability to flexibly control thoughts in accordance with our goals
- Includes ability to stop unwanted thoughts
Inhibitory control in the brain (Anderson et al, 2004)
-Increased activity:
- Prefrontal cortex
- Anterior cingulate cortex
- Decreased activity: hippocampus (memory area)
Psychogenic amnesia - AMN case study
- AMN: a case study
- 23 years old
- House fire triggered earlier memory from when he was 4 years old, witnessed someone die in a car crash/fire
- Could not remember anything after 17 years old
- Retrograde amnesia
What happens when anterograde and retrograde amnesia patients are tested for memory?
- Anterograde amnesia tests – patients performed similar to controls
- Patients and controls equally distinguished names of cities from fictitious names of cities
- Retrograde amnesia tests – patient’s lower recollections of autobiographical memories from their past
