Selective remembering and directed forgetting are influenced by similar stimulus properties

ABSTRACT

Do the properties of to-be-remembered events influence the ability to remember, and also intentionally forget, these events in similar ways? Prior work has examined how the font size, animacy, emotionality, concreteness (the degree to which a word denotes something perceptible), frequency (how often a word appears in language), and length of to-be-remembered words influence memory. However, it was previously unclear whether the forgetting of information is also influenced by these characteristics. In six experiments, we used an item-method directed forgetting task where we presented participants with to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten words varying in font size (large or small), animacy (animate or inanimate), emotionality (negative or neutral), concreteness (high or low), frequency (high or low), and word length (long or short). Results revealed that animacy, emotionality, concreteness, frequency, and word length (but not font size) influenced both remembering and forgetting. Together, the present findings indicate that the characteristics of presented words can influence remembering as well as directed forgetting, providing further evidence that the remembering and forgetting processes are governed by similar properties.

KEYWORDS:

• Directed forgetting
• selective rehearsal
• stimulus properties
• memory
• recall

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Lily Kiamanesh for assistance generating stimuli and Yuning Chen for assistance preparing the data sets. We also thank Mary Whatley for helpful comments regarding the analyses and Catherine Sandhofer for her helpful comments regarding the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Animate items consisted of various animals while inanimate items included clothing, furniture, instruments, and tools. Stimuli were taken from VanArsdall and Blunt (2021); they provided scores for each word in terms of being alive, the ability to think, and the ability to move and we calculated a composite score for each word and these values were used to create the word lists.

2 In addition to subject-level analyses, we also computed item-analyses in each experiment. Although not reported in the present manuscript, these results generally corroborated the subject-level analyses.