The role of intentional forgetting in reducing children's retroactive interference.

Abstract

Preschool and kindergarten children's retention of stories was examined in the presence of interfering information and instructions to forget. Children learned 2 stories and, 24 hr later, were asked to recall the 1st or 2nd story learned. Some of the children were instructed, either following acquisition or just prior to the retention test, to forget the 2nd, or interfering, story. A model was used to isolate storage and retrieval effects, and the results showed that (a) retroactive interference affected both storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates for the younger children but only storage-based forgetting rates for the older children, (b) intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily by attenuating storage-based forgetting regardless of age, (c) intentional forgetting instructions were effective only at acquisition for preschoolers but at both acquisition and retention for kindergarteners, and (d) all children recalled the to-be-forgotten story as well as they recalled the to-be-remembered story. These results are interpreted in terms of reorganization and distinctiveness effects in storage.

Children (but Not Adults) Can Inhibit False Memories

“…These effects are consistent with Howe's (2002) finding that young children can inhibit recall when instructed to do so. More important, these findings are identical to Kimball and Bjork's (2002) findings for adults, except, of course, that the rates of recall are lower for children.…”

“…Interestingly, these inhibition effects did not vary significantly with age. The absence of age effects in children's inhibition has been reported before in a directed-forgetting task (Howe, 2002), and the lack of such effects in the present case may reflect the fact that significant age effects may not emerge until children are much older than those tested in this study. Indeed, some researchers have argued that age differences in effortful processing may not appear until early adolescence on some tasks (e.g., Wilson & Kipp, 1998).…”

Selective postevent review and children’s memory for nonreviewed materials

“…The authors attributed this to an increased availability of resources for meeting the inhibitory requirements of the task, resulting from decreasing the resources required for discriminating between the to-be-remembered information and the to-be-forgotten information. Similarly, Howe (2002) found evidence suggestive of efficient inhibition on a modified directed forgetting task in 4-and 6-year-olds-a younger age than would have been predicted based on prior directed forgetting research. Providing a forgetting instruction helped to prevent a newly presented story from interfering with childrenÕs recall of a similar story that had been heard earlier.…”

“…Although accounts of retrieval-induced forgetting in adults emphasize the role of retrieval-based inhibition in memory impairment , changes to the organization of information in storage-reducing its later accessibilitymay also arise as a consequence of inhibition (Anderson, 2003;Howe, 2002;Lehman, Srokowski, Hall, Renkey, & Cruz, 2003). In the current experiment there were, necessarily, longer interpolated delays between review sessions for children engaging in spaced review, and the delay between the event and the first review session was inevitably shorter for children engaging in spaced review than for those engaging in massed review.…”

“…This process of preventing task-irrelevant information from entering the information-processing stream has been proposed to be a central mechanism in cognitive development, with developmental improvements in the efficiency of cognitive processing attributed to increases in the efficiency of cognitive inhibition (Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1990;Dempster, 1993;Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1993). There is growing interest in how the nature of a task influences childrenÕs ability to demonstrate efficient inhibition of task-irrelevant information (Howe, 2002;Wilson, Kipp, & Daniels, 2003). Examining whether selective review impairs childrenÕs memory for nonreviewed materials therefore has the potential to further elucidate the influence of task demands on whether developmental differences in inhibitory efficiency are found.…”