Active Forgetting

Question 1

What is repression? Whose ideas is this based on?

Answer 1

“An active mechanism to prevent remembering”

Based on Freud’s ideas (memories damaging to the ego are suppressed to avoid anxiety).

Question 2

What did Wilkinson & Cargill (1955) find in their study of repression and sexual imagery?
What then caused no effect?

Answer 2

Men have worse memory than women for the sexual material.
No effect was shown when subjects are not told that the experiment is about personality.

Question 3

What did Levinger & Clark (1961) find in their free association task with neutral/emotional stimulus words?

Answer 3

Free associates to neutral words were recalled better than those to emotional words.

Question 4

Memory for stimulus words is generally better if they are ________.

Answer 4

Arousing.

Question 5

What is the Action-Decrement theory?
(Walker, 1958)

Answer 5

Memory traces take time to consolidate.

Physiological arousal increases the time for the trace to consolidate, but may improve longer-term encoding.

Question 6

Anderson et al., (2006) Results:

Memory for Arousing Stimuli is ________.

Memory for Neutral Stimuli shortly before Arousing ones is _______.

Enhancement is for _______ rather than _______.

Answer 6

Enhanced.
Enhanced.
Remembering, Knowing.

Question 7

Vocabulary learning is enhanced by negative arousing pictures _______ after or ______ after successful retrieval.

Answer 7

Immediately, 2 seconds.

Question 8

In what situation does arousal not enhance performance?

Answer 8

When restudying items.

Question 9

Is there experimental support for general repression?

Answer 9

No.

Question 10

What does part-list cueing do to memory?

Answer 10

It impairs it.

Question 11

What is retrieval induced forgetting?

Answer 11

The idea that recall is enhanced for practiced exemplars of practiced categories,
but impaired for unpracticed exemplars of practiced categories.

Question 12

What is Item-Method Directed Forgetting?

Answer 12

This yields substantial REMEMBER - FORGET differences that can be observed in both Recall and Recognition.

Question 13

Is Item-Method Directed Forgetting due to an encoding effect or an inhibition of items in storage?

Answer 13

An encoding effect.

Question 14

What is List-Method Directed Forgetting?

Answer 14

This generally produces large recall deficits for TBF lists relative to TBR or control lists (often not observed in recognition tests).

Question 15

Is List-Method Directed Forgetting due to an encoding effect or an inhibition of retrieval?

Answer 15

Retrieval Inhibition.
Items remain in memory but are actively inhibited from being recalled.

Question 16

What are 3 possible causes of Suppression Mechanisms?

Answer 16

1. Generation of Alternative Associations
2. Inhibition of Cue-Target Connection
3. Direct Inhibition of Target

Question 17

What are some practical implications of inhibition?

Answer 17

Individual differences in ability may explain variations in recovery from trauma.

Inhibition paradigms can be extended to memories for real events.

Active suppression through NO-THINK or Directed Forgetting could potentially explain loss of memories from Childhood Sexual Abuse.

In everyday situations, inhibition may be important for successful retrieval, and other domains such as creative problems solving.

Question 18

There is no evidence for traditional Freudian repression in the sense of _________.

However, there is evidence that information held in storage can be ________.

Answer 18

Automatic suppression of emotional material.

Actively inhibited.

Question 19

What is practical active repression?

Answer 19

Thinking about stuff repeatedly will almost certainly make it more likely to be remembered, and actively not thinking about stuff may actually inhibit retrieval from storage.