Replicating remembering “remembering”

ABSTRACT

When examining spontaneously recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, victims report that there had been periods in which they had forgotten the abuse. However, there are sometimes people with whom the victim had spoken about the abuse during the period in which the victim had supposedly forgotten the abuse, suggesting the victim had not forgotten the abuse but the prior recall of the abuse. The underestimation of previous knowledge is termed the forgot-it-all-along effect. The goal of the present study was replicating the results of a laboratory study that had provided a theoretical understanding for the forgot-it-all-along effect by showing that people have difficulties remembering “remembering” when the memory had previously been recalled in a different context. The effect was replicated by using the same neutral context sentences, suggesting the finding was robust. We also extended the experimental design by using positive and negative context sentences, but it did not become smaller when the positive sentences provided the different context or larger when the negative sentences provided the different context. Although the sample sizes were sufficiently large to provide statistical power for the forgot-it-all-along effect, they may not have been sufficiently large to observe the moderation effects of emotional context.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• forgot-it-all-along effect
• remembering
• emotional context
• replication

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Arnold for providing the neutral sentences and the E-Prime programme used to conduct the experiment. They also would like to thank Rob Nash, Steve Lindsay, and Linda Henkel for their helpful suggestions to improve the study. The context sentences and data of the experiment can be found at: https://osf.io/vum42/

Disclosure statement

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