Decades of research have established that the intent to remember information has no effect on episodic long-term memory. This claim, which is routinely taught in introductory cognitive psychology courses, is based entirely on pure-list between-subjects designs in which memory performance is equal for intentional and incidental learning groups. In the current 11 experiments, participants made semantic judgements about each word in a list but they had to remember only words presented in a specific color. We demonstrate that in such mixed-list designs there is a substantial difference between intentionally and incidentally learned items. The first four experiments show that this finding is independent of the remember cue onset relative to the semantic judgment. The remaining seven experiments test alternative explanations as to why intent only matters in mixed-list designs but not in pure-list designs-inhibition of incidentally learned items, output interference, selective relational encoding, or selective thresholdshifting. We found substantial support for the threshold-shifting account according to which the intent to remember boosts item-context associations in both mixed-and pure-list designs; however, in pure-list between-subjects designs, participants in the incidental learning group can use a lower retrieval threshold to compensate for the weaker memory traces. This led to more extralist intrusions in incidental learning groups; incidental learning groups also showed a source memory deficit. We conclude that intent always matters for long-term learning, but that the effect is masked in traditional between-subjects designs. Our results suggest that researchers need to rethink the role of intent in long-term memory.

No abstract

How does the intent to remember or forget information affect working memory (WM)? To explore this question, in four experiments, we gauged the availability of the to-be-forgotten information directly. Participants remembered six words presented sequentially in separate frames. After each word offset, the frame turned either blue or orange, indicating a to-be-remembered or to-be-forgotten word, respectively. In all experiments, consistently poor recognition performance for to-be-forgotten words and facilitation of to-be-remembered words demonstrated that intent has a strong impact on WM. These directed-forgetting effects are remarkably robust: They can be observed when testing the to-be-forgotten words up to four times (Experiment 1, n = 341), for both item and binding memory (Experiment 3, n = 124), and even when information has to be maintained in WM up to 5 s until the memory cue is presented (Experiment 2 þ 4, n = 302 þ 321). Our study establishes a new method to jointly study the effects of intent on WM content for both relevant and irrelevant information and provides evidence for directed forgetting in WM. Our research suggests that a combination of two processes causes directed forgetting in WM: One process reduces memory strength of earlier memory representations as a function of subsequently encoded events. Another process rapidly encodes or boosts memory strength only when the person intends to remember that information.

No abstract