Intentional and incidental encoding of item and associative information in the directed forgetting procedure

Abstract

The intentional and incidental encoding of individual words and associations between pairs of words was examined using the item-based directed forgetting procedure. Item and associative recognition were both greater for word pairs followed by a remember (R) cue than a forget (F) cue. Associative discrimination for F-cued pairs was above chance in most conditions, demonstrating that relational informational is encoded incidentally. Item, but not associative, discrimination increased with longer presentation time prior to the cue, indicating that the encoding of item information benefited from maintenance rehearsal but the encoding of relational information did not (Experiments 1A and 1B). The incidental encoding of associations was, though, greater for pairs of words with pre-experimental associations (e.g., needle point), but these pre-experimental associations did not improve memory for pairs that participants tried to remember (Experiment 2). This pattern of results for R-and F-cued pairs mimicked the age-related associative deficit observed by Ahmad, Fernandes, and Hockley (Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 22, 452-472 2015) in comparisons of associative memory between young and older adults.

Dissociating the Electrophysiological Correlates between Item Retrieval and Associative Retrieval in Associative Recognition: From the Perspective of Directed Forgetting

“…Second, we found that ERP of TBF_r condition was more negative than that of TBF_R, TBFr_r, TBRr_r condition between 500 and 800 ms, which indicated that associative information can be directed-forgotten. This is consistent with the results of Bancroft et al (2013) and Hockley et al (2015). Finally, in 300–500 ms interval, TBF_r condition evoked more negative-going potentials than TBRr_r condition (DF effect) but similar to TBFr_r condition (absent DF effect).…”

“…Some researchers reported it was hard to forget associative information (Golding et al, 1994; Hanczakowski et al, 2012). For example, Golding et al (1994) presented compound word pairs, such as “seat-belt,” and found that participants could not forget the word “belt” when it followed the TBR word “seat.” On the contrary, some researchers found associative information can be directed-forgotten under certain circumstance (Gottlob and Golding, 2007; Bancroft et al, 2013; Hockley et al, 2015). In the study of Bancroft and colleagues, participants were told to generate an association that would relate the two items together following a Remember instruction while not to form any association following a Forget instruction.…”

‘Forget me (not)?’ – Remembering Forget-Items Versus Un-Cued Items in Directed Forgetting

“…Of course, there are ambiguities associated with leaving participants to their own devices in an experiment and presenting material that is not associated with any specific instruction. Behavioral data cannot fully answer the question of what participants actually do when receiving an UI versus an TBF instructions, although incidental encoding situations are quite natural and have been amply used in the literature (e.g., Craik and Lockhart, 1972 ; Hockley, 2008 ; Hockley et al, 2015 ). By some TBF might be considered as even stricter F cues.…”

Too hard to forget? ERPs to remember, forget, and uninformative cues in the encoding phase of item‐method directed forgetting

“…In fact, a number of studies report that inhibition may fail due to ironic processes, especially in the long run (Wegner, 1994;Wegner et al, 1993Wegner et al, , 1987. In this vein, in item-method directed forgetting, a number of behavioral studies have shown that longer postcue intervals improve performance on TBF items (Bancroft et al, 2013;Lee & Lee, 2011;Lee et al, 2007), and prolonged exposure increases the specific TBF item memory (Hockley et al, 2016).…”