Maxcey Ashleigh M, Dezso Bernadette, Megla Emma, Schneider Ashton
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1835 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2019 Jul 16;4(1):25. doi: 10.1186/s41235-019-0180-5.
Intentional forgetting refers to the attempt to marshal top-down control to purposefully forget, and has been demonstrated in the laboratory using directed forgetting paradigms. Here, we asked whether the mechanisms of top-down control can run in the opposite direction to prevent the forgetting of information; that is, can we actively resist unintentional forgetting? Recognition-induced forgetting is an unintentional forgetting effect in which accessing one memory leads to the forgetting of related memories. Just as intentional forgetting possesses intuitively appealing control over eliminating undesirable memories, resisting unintentional forgetting over desired memories would improve cognitive performance. We showed subjects a 9-min video to teach them about the recognition-induced forgetting paradigm and how recognition of certain objects unintentionally leads to forgetting of semantically related objects. After testing their comprehension of the video, we conducted a typical recognition-induced forgetting experiment and challenged the subjects to resist this form of unintentional forgetting. Despite their knowledge of the forgetting effect, and the challenge to subjects to resist the forgetting induced by the paradigm, recognition-induced forgetting persisted. These results show that knowledge of this unintentional forgetting phenomenon and the challenge to resist forgetting do not eliminate it, suggesting that it is cognitively impenetrable.
有意遗忘是指试图运用自上而下的控制来有目的地遗忘，并且在实验室中通过定向遗忘范式得到了验证。在此，我们探讨了自上而下的控制机制是否能逆向运行以防止信息遗忘；也就是说，我们能否积极抵制无意遗忘？识别引发的遗忘是一种无意遗忘效应，即提取一个记忆会导致相关记忆的遗忘。正如有意遗忘在消除不良记忆方面具有直观上吸引人的控制作用一样，抵制对期望记忆的无意遗忘会提高认知表现。我们向受试者展示了一段9分钟的视频，向他们讲解识别引发的遗忘范式，以及对某些物体的识别如何无意地导致语义相关物体的遗忘。在测试他们对视频的理解之后，我们进行了一个典型的识别引发遗忘实验，并要求受试者抵制这种无意遗忘形式。尽管他们了解遗忘效应，并且面临抵制该范式引发的遗忘的挑战，但识别引发的遗忘仍然存在。这些结果表明，对这种无意遗忘现象的了解以及抵制遗忘的挑战并不能消除它，这表明它在认知上是不可穿透的。
