Week 5 Lecture 5 - motivated forgetting Flashcards
Why are we motivated to forget?
- environmental cues bring to mind traumatic memories
- forgetting is beneficial
- retain a positive outlook towards life (positivity bias)
What is a positivity bias?
Tendency to recall more pleasant memories than either neutral or unpleasant ones
Does positivity bias increase over the lifespan?
yes
What did a study into positivity bias find?
- older adults recalled about twice as many positive than negative images
- young ppts recalled equal amounts of positive and negative images
- recognition was equal for positive and negative
What are 2 possible reasons for positivity bias?
1.) as we get older our focus shifts away from goals concerning the future and instead maintain a sense of well-being
2.) older people are more skilled in emotional regulation inc. better control of what we remember
True or false
Motives alter what we remember and we get better at it as we get older
True
What is repression according to Freud?
- psychological defence mechanism aimed at rejecting
- keeps something out of consciousness
- can still affect behaviour and emotions
What is the difference between repression and suppression?
repression:
- unconscious process
- automatic
Suppression:
- conscious process
- intentional, goal directed
What 3 things make up motivated forgetting?
- intentional forgetting
- psychogenic amnesia
- other
What is intentional fogetting?
- conscious goal to forget
- intentional contextual shifts (avoidance of cues)
What is Psychogenic amnesia?
- profound forgetting
- psychological in origin
What is other?
- not accidental but also not consciously intended
What are 3 methods of controlling what we remember?
- limit encoding
- prevent retrieval
- stop retrieval
How do you limit encoding?
- look away from stimulus
- focus on pleasant aspects of stimulus
- stop elaborative thoughts
How do you prevent retrieval?
- intentionally shift to new thought
- avoid cues/ reminders
How do you stop retrieval?
in the face of a reminder:
- actively supress the unwanted memory
What has the item method been used to study?
Limiting retrieval
What has the list method been used to study?
preventing retrieval
What are 2 methods of directed forgetting?
- item method
- list method
What has directed forgetting been observed in?
- recall tests
- recognition tests
How does the item method reflect differences in episodic encoding?
- remembering instructions = elaborative semantic encoding
- forget instruction = release attention and stop rehearsal
What is the item method process?
- told an item then told whether to remember or forget it
- additionally given a secondary task to complete –> to show forgetting isn’t passive
Is forgetting passive or active (item method)?
- forget instruction engages an active process that disrupts encoding
- encoding suppression –> active process adopted at encoding and restricts which experiences we allow into memory
Why do we need encoding supression?
- regulates which experiences will be allowed into memory
- life has difficulties –> reducing the footprint of negative experience is always a plus
- bias in remembering more positive than negative characteristics about oneself, but matched memory when these relate to someone else
- regulate our memory to protect self-image, when feedback poses high level of threat
What is the list method?
2 groups
- 1 group told one list, told to forget it then told another list
- 1 group learns both lists
What does the list method find?
- subjects in the forget condition show a deficit in List 1 final recall compared to subjects in the remember condition (cost)
- subjects in the forget condition recall more List 2 items than subjects in the remember condition due to proactive interference (benefit)
What did a naturalistic diary study with list-method directed forgetting find?
The forget group (compared to the remember group) had poorer memory for:
- first week events
- example items that neither group thought the would have to recall
- both negative and positive mood events
What are 2 possible mechanisms underlying list-method directed forgetting?
- retrieval inhibition hypothesis
- context shift hypothesis
What is the retrieval inhibition hypothesis?
Forget instruction inhibit List 1 items
- reduces the activation of unwanted memories however the remain available
Re-presenting forgotten items restores their activation levels
- explains why item can be recognised but not recalled
What is the context shift hypothesis?
Forget instructions mentally separate List 1 from List 2 items
- the mental context shifts between the lists
- List 2 context lingers into the final test
- The new context is a poor retrieval cue from List 1 items
May involve inhibition of the unwanted context
What did empirical support for the context shift hypothesis find?
- even without instruction to forget, context shift led to worse recall of List 1
- part of the directed-forgetting effect arises from a shift in mental context
What are motivated context shifts?
- removing environmental cues
- avoid reminders
What is inhibitory control?
inhibit unwanted actions or thoughts
What are 2 types of inhibitory control?
- behavioural/action control
- cognitive control
What is behavioural/action control?
the ability to initiate, discontinue or prevent motor actions based on goals
What is cognitive control?
- the ability to flexibly control thought in accordance with out goals
- includes ability to stop unwanted thoughts from entering consciousness
What task is associated with behavioural/action control?
- go/no-go task
What task is associated with cognitve control?
think/no-think task
What is the go/no-go task?
measures inhibitory control over action
Task:
- press a button whenever a letter appears on the screen
- if the letter is an X, withhold the response
What is the think/no-think task?
- measures inhibitory control over memory
What are the 3 effects under the think/no-think paradigm?
- total control effect
- positive control effect
- negative control effect
What is the total control effect?
- think > no-think
- intentional control yields lasting retrieval consequences
What is the positive control effect?
- think > baseline
- reminders without intention to suppress facilitate memories
What is the negative control effects?
- no-think < baseline
- reminders with intention to suppress inhibit memories
Under TNT:
when did suppression increase?
with more suppression trails per event
Under TNT:
was memory suppression replicated?
yes with various stimulus combinations
e.g., word pairs, face-scene, scene -object pairs
Under TNT:
What did suppression occur with?
with neutral and unwanted/unpleasant memories
but still unclear if emotional memories are more/less suppressible
Under TNT:
after a single suppression, how long did forgetting last?
at least 24 hours
Under TNT:
people with diminished cognitive control showed what?
showed less suppression-induced forgetting
What did a study into inhibitory control and whether it is impaired in PTSD find?
- across memory measures, suppression was diminished in the PTSD group compared to CG
- retrieval suppression was most compromised in people with the most severe symptoms
What is psychogenic amnesia triggered by?
trauma/severe psychological stressors
What might psychogenic amnesia cause?
profound loss of personal memories
What does psychogenic amnesia lack?
an observable neurobiological basis
In psychogenic amnesia what memories are intact?
- memory for public events and general knowledge
- ability to form new memories
What are 2 forms of psychogenic amnesia?
- global –> affects entire history
- situation specific –> affects only memory for the traumatic event
What is a possible mechanism for psychogenic amnesia?
extreme psychological distress –> involuntary suppression retrieval in relation to certain stimuli
What is spontaneous recovery?
the re-emergence of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a delay in classical conditioning
the stronger the initial memory, the more likely to recover
What did a study into spontaneous recovery in episodic memory find?
- List 1 initially suffers from retroactive interference
- After 30 minutes, recall for list 1 improves
- Same results across studies with different stimulus types
Why do memories spontaneously recover?
If retroactive interference reflects inhibition of responses that had been previously relevant:
- forgotten memories recover when inhibition is gradually released
- inhibition appears to decrease over time
- retrieval-induced forgetting is significantly reduced after a 24-hour delay
What did a study into whether repeated failures to recover a memory mean that memory is not recoverable find?
- successive recall attempts led to recalling previously forgotten ones
- people often display reminiscence
What is reminiscence?
remembering again the forgotten without relearning
What is hypermnesia?
- improvement in recall arsing from repeated testing sessions on the same material
- increases with more recall tests
- largest effects on free recall, but also appears for cued recall and recognition
What did a study into hypermnesia find?
- recall improved over testing days
- essentially reversed Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve
- larger effects for pictures than for less-imageable words
- arises through visualisations and reconstruction
What did a study into hypermnesia with realistic memories find?
- the number of verifiable details remembered increased over the interviews = hypermnesia
Biasing attention can lead to what?
can lead to forgetting of the unattended elements
But encountering the right cue can lead to memory recovery
What did a study into cue reinstatement find?
- without cues, memory for the nonreviewed categories was impaired
- providing the category cues eliminated the forgetting effect
- true for negatives as well as neutral memories
What are 2 avenues of memory recovery?
Suggestive therapy:
- memories may reflect therapist’s suggestions rather than reality
- lack corroborative evidence
Spontaneous recovery:
- more likely to be genuine
- more likely to be corroborative
What did a study into avenues of memory recovery find?
- caution when interpreting memory recovery after suggestive therapy
- not all recovered memories are the same
- discontinuous memories are just as verifiable as continuous
What did a study into prior remembering of recovered memories find?
- the ability to recall prior remembrances is diminished if the retrieval perspective differed
- people may have a recovered memory experience because they simply forget remembering it before
