ERP evidence for successful voluntary avoidance of conscious recollection

The Role of Inhibition in Learning

“…They supported this claim by pointing to an enhanced frontal positivity and posterior negativity for Think trials that occur well before the late parietal positivity denoting conscious recollection. As a further indication that participants are able to intentionally avoid thinking about unwanted memories on the level of individual items, Bergströ m et al (2007) demonstrated that the ERP signature of conscious recollection observed during Think trials was practically absent during No-Think trials. These data converge with the aforementioned neuroimaging evidence offered by and Depue, Curran, & Banich (2007) demonstrating that the magnitude of forgetting for suppressed items is predicted by deactivations of the hippocampus, the brain region tied to both recollective encoding and retrieval.…”

“…Bergströ m, Velmans, de Fockert, and Richardson-Klavehn (2007) concluded that strategic control of memories begins at an attentional selection stage preceding conscious recollection when participants permit Think cues-but not NoThink cues-to undergo further retrieval processing. They supported this claim by pointing to an enhanced frontal positivity and posterior negativity for Think trials that occur well before the late parietal positivity denoting conscious recollection.…”

Anticipatory Signatures of Voluntary Memory Suppression

“…Two recent ERP studies also addressed electrophysiological correlates during the T/NT task (Bergström et al, 2007(Bergström et al, , 2009). Contrasting T with NT trials, Bergström et al (2007Bergström et al ( , 2009) found a reduced left parietal positivity to be elicited by NT items, interpreted to reflect voluntary avoidance of automatic recollection.…”

“…Concerning the effects on memory cue presentation, our expectations were guided by previous work showing that stronger ERP positivity over frontal and left parietal electrode sites indexes retrieval success and recollection (Allan et al, 1996;Rugg et al, 1998). Such positivity might be downregulated during episodic memory inhibition (Bergström et al, 2007).…”

Towards a Cognitive and Neurobiological Model of Motivated Forgetting

“…Although, the negative control effect has been replicated many times, sometimes no reliable effect is observed even though it would be expected (e.g., Bulevich et al, 2006 ;Bergström, Velmans, de Fockert, & Richardson-Klavehn, 2007 ;Mecklinger, Parra, & Waldhauser, 2009 ;Hertel & Mahan, 2008 ;Hertel & Calcaterra, 2005 ) . For instance, Bulevich et al conducted three experiments with variants of the Think/ No-Think paradigm that closely paralleled earlier studies and observed 3%, 4%, and 1% negative control effects on the Same probe test, and similarly small effects on the Independent Probe test.…”