Brief wakeful resting can eliminate directed forgetting

ABSTRACT

When cued to intentionally forget previously encoded memories, participants typically show reduced recall of the memories on a later recall test. We examined how such directed forgetting is affected by a brief period of wakeful resting between encoding and test. Encoding was followed by a “passive” wakeful resting period in which subjects heard emotionally neutral music or perceived neutral pictures, or it was followed by an “active” distraction period in which subjects were engaged in counting or calculation tasks. Whereas typical directed forgetting was present after active distraction, the forgetting was absent after wakeful resting. The findings indicate that the degree to which people can intentionally forget memories is influenced by the cognitive activity that people engage in shortly after learning takes place. The results provide first evidence on the interplay between wakeful resting and intentional forgetting.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• directed forgetting
• wakeful resting
• reactivation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Typically, the forget cue does not only reduce recall of the first list but does also improve recall of the second list (e.g., Geiselman et al., 1983). Because in this study the focus is exclusively on first-list recall, however, this effect is ignored here.

2. Regarding recall performance for the remaining List-1 items in the remember and forget conditions, results showed recall rates of 92.9% (SE = 1.5) and 90.4% (SE = 2.7) in the counting group, 93.3% (SE = 1.4) and 90.4% (SE = 2.0) in the calculation group, 92.5% (SE = 2.5) and 93.8% (SE = 2.1) in the music condition, and 95.0% (SE = 1.7) and 90.0% (SE = 2.5) in the pictures condition. Analysis of variance revealed no significant effects, all ps > .080. These results replicate prior work, showing that effects of the forget cue on List 1 recall are largely absent if the items' word stems are provided as retrieval cues at test (e.g., Bäuml & Samenieh, 2010, 2012a).