Nørby Simon, Lange Martin, Larsen Axel
Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2010 Jan;133(1):73-80. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2009.10.002. Epub 2009 Nov 10.
Can we control the content of our memory and forget what we do not want to think about by an act of will? If so, is forgetting temporary or permanent, and is it independent of the nature of what we wish to forget? Using Anderson and Green's (2001) "think/no-think" paradigm with neutral and emotional nouns, we found in agreement with other studies that memory for neutral words was reduced instantly upon repeated attempts at suppression. However, the effect was temporary and vanished after a period of one week, which strongly suggests that intended memory suppression interferes with immediate retrieval but does not lead to long-term forgetting. Furthermore, the amount of training that clearly reduced immediate recall of neutral items did not at all reduce recall of emotional items. This finding is in accordance with the notion that emotional items have a higher degree of salience and tend to attract more attention than neutral items.
我们能否通过意志行为来控制记忆的内容，忘掉那些我们不想去想的事情呢？如果可以，遗忘是暂时的还是永久的，它是否与我们想要遗忘的事物的性质无关呢？运用安德森和格林（2001年）针对中性和情感性名词的“想/不想”范式，我们与其他研究结果一致地发现，对于中性词的记忆在反复尝试抑制后会立即减少。然而，这种效果是暂时的，一周后就消失了，这有力地表明有意的记忆抑制会干扰即时提取，但不会导致长期遗忘。此外，明显减少中性项目即时回忆的训练量丝毫没有减少情感项目的回忆。这一发现与以下观点相符，即情感项目具有更高的显著性，比中性项目更容易吸引更多关注。
