Thinking about the future can cause forgetting of the past

Abstract

People are able to imagine events in the future that have not yet happened, an ability referred to as episodic future thinking. There is now compelling evidence that episodic future thinking is accomplished via processes similar to those that underlie episodic retrieval. Drawing upon work on retrieval-induced forgetting, which has shown that retrieving some items in memory can cause the forgetting of other items in memory, we show that engaging in episodic future thinking can cause related autobiographical memories (Experiments 1–3) and episodic event descriptions (Experiments 3–4) to become less recallable in the future than they would have been otherwise. This finding suggests that episodic future thinking can serve as a memory modifier by changing the extent to which memories from our past can be subsequently retrieved.

Keywords:

• Episodic future thinking
• Retrieval-induced forgetting
• Autobiographical memory
• Inhibition

Notes

¹Methodological differences between Storm and Jobe (2012) and Ditta and Storm: total number of items studied per context cue (SJ: three events; DS: four events); study time per context cue (SJ: 30 seconds; DS: 40 seconds); total number of future thought practice trials (SJ: two; DS: none); filler task between context cues (SJ: an out-loud number reading task; DS: none); total number of future thoughts generated per context cue (SJ: four; DS: three); future thought labeling (SJ: no titles, multiple phenomenological ratings; DS: short title; no ratings); structure of procedure (SJ: study phase and EFT phase interleaved such that participants generated future thoughts for some contexts immediately after studying associated events, but not others; DS: study phase and EFT phase blocked such that participants studied events for all contexts before generating future thoughts associated with some of those contexts); participants (SJ: undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago; DS: undergraduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz)