Survival processing and directed forgetting: enhanced memory for both to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten information

ABSTRACT

In a recently published study, (Parker, A., Parkin, A., & Dagnall, N. (2021). Effects of survival processing on list method directed forgetting. Memory (Hove, England), 29(5), 645–661) examined directed forgetting in a survival processing context using the list-method directed forgetting procedure. (Parker, A., Parkin, A., & Dagnall, N. (2021). Effects of survival processing on list method directed forgetting. Memory (Hove, England), 29(5), 645–661) found that the costs of directed forgetting were greater when engaging in survival processing than when making moving relevance or pleasantness ratings. However, according to most current accounts of directed forgetting, engaging in survival processing should not have enhanced the directed forgetting effect but rather should not have impacted the directed forgetting effect. In the present study, we further investigated how survival processing impacts directed forgetting using both the list (Experiment 1) and item method of directed forgetting (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we did not replicate the findings of (Parker, A., Parkin, A., & Dagnall, N. (2021). Effects of survival processing on list method directed forgetting. Memory (Hove, England), 29(5), 645–661) – that the directed forgetting effect is enhanced when engaging in survival processing. Rather, we demonstrated that making survival ratings and moving ratings yielded a similar cost of directed forgetting for List 1 items. In Experiment 2, survival processing provided an overall memory benefit (but not when recalling to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten items in separate recall tests) but did not differentially impact to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten words. Thus, we did not find evidence that survival processing influences directed forgetting.

KEYWORDS:

• Survival processing
• directed forgetting
• adaptive memory
• inhibition
• selective rehearsal

Acknowledgement

The author certifies that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organisation or entity with any financial or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript. The experiments reported in this article were not formally preregistered, and the stimuli and data have been made available on the Open Science Framework here. I would like to thank Lily Kiamanesh for her assistance in reviewing the literature and collecting data. I also thank Matt Rhodes and Alan Castel for their helpful comments regarding the project and manuscript.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/4v527/?view_only = 96932640bd664911b51db8159c01c0c0.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Prior work has examined survival ratings using ANCOVA, but there is increasing support that researchers should instead favor item-level generalized logistic mixed-effect regression models (see Jaeger, 2008).

2 Prior work has found an interaction between directed forgetting instruction and test order such that there were only benefits of directed forgetting when List 2 was recall first (Pastötter et al., 2012). Thus, we included test order in our analysis to determine whether the order in which participants recalled items impacts the relationship between survival processing and directed forgetting.

3 Prior work has demonstrated that recall order can differentially impact recall as a function of item strength. As such, we included recall order in our analysis.