Strategies of remembering: a study of directed forgetting

Abstract

This study was an investigation of the processes underlying people's performance in directed forgetting experiments. A variety of techniques were employed for this purpose, including paired associate probe, free recall, and running recognition tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 used a repeated item technique to examine the relative contributions of selective rehearsal and item differenti­ation in determining the effect of an instruction to forget. Both rehearsal and item differentiation were found to contibute, but the latter was shown to be effective only when subjects were unaware of item repetition, or unable to attach any significance to it. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 investigated the importance of the temporal location of a forget instruction relative to the placement of the to-be-forgotten items, as well as the effect of providing alternative dimensions for encoding the stimuli. Experiment 3, which was a free recall task, demonstrated that when the instruction to forget was close to the to-be-forgotten words, they received minimal process­ing and were quickly forgotten. When it was located further away, however, the effect was substantially reduced. Experiments 4 and 5, which were paired associate tasks, demonstrated that subjects were unable to make the best possible use of a forget instruction when there was uncertainty as to the form that the Instruction might take. It was concluded that the first five experiments, which employed variants of standard directed forgetting paradigms, in fact examined subject's strategies for remembering. Experiments 6 and 7 used new procedures which were designed to examine whether people can actively forget. The results of those experiments suggested that they can, provided the experimental situation is appropriately structured. Show more