L5 Active Forgetting

Question 1

What is repression ?

Answer 1

An active mechanism to prevent remembering
Freud - avoid anxiety

Question 2

How can you enhance LTM with arousal ?

Answer 2

After 7 days, recall of emotional words was better than neutral words
Anderson - memory for arousing stimuli is enhanced, memory for neutral stimuli shortly before arousing ones is enhanced

Question 3

What is the action-decrement theory ?

Answer 3

Memory traces take time to consolidate - physiological arousal increases the time for the trace to consolidate, but may improve long term encoding

Question 4

What did Finn and Rodger find about reconsolidation from arousal ?

Answer 4

Learning is enhanced by negative arousing images
Does not enhance performance while restudying items

Question 5

How are arousal and memory linked ?

Answer 5

Weapon focus - arousal effects memory
Emotional influences on memory are broad
Lab experiments never show a simple impairment in memory
No support for repression

Question 6

What is retrieval induced forgetting ?

Answer 6

Remembering causes forgetting of other memories
Anderson, Bjork and Bjork
Encode categories pairs
Associations are made to help remembering

Question 7

What is directed forgetting ?

Answer 7

The participants are instructed to forget items
Item method directed forgetting - enhance items relative to forget items
List method directed forgetting - retrieval inhibition, items remain in memory but are stopped from being recalled

Question 8

What is direct suppression ?

Answer 8

Performance increases when repeat think words
Declines when repeat no think words

Question 9

What are the causes of suppression ?

Answer 9

1. Generation of alternative associations
2. Inhibition of cue-target connection
3. Direct inhibition of target

Question 10

What are some practical implications of inhibitions ?

Answer 10

Success in inhibition appears to be correlated with active engagement of prefrontal cortex
Inhibition paradigms can be extended to memories for real events
Inhibition may be important for successful retrieval

Question 11

Is there evidence for Freud’s active forgetting ?

Answer 11

No evidence for traditional Freudian repression - no automatic repression
Emotional items well remembered
Thinking about stuff repeatedly will make it more likely to be remembered