Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University.
Department of Psychology, Heidelberg University.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Sep;30(9):1303-1317. doi: 10.1177/0956797619859531. Epub 2019 Jul 30.
In the present study, we used an item-method directed-forgetting paradigm to test whether instructions to forget or remember one item affect memory for subsequently studied items. In two experiments (s = 138 and 33, respectively), recall was higher when a word pair was preceded during study by a to-be-forgotten word pair. This effect was cumulative: Performance increased when more preceding study items were to be forgotten. The effect decreased when memory was conditioned on instructions for items appearing farther back in the study list. Experiment 2 used a dual-task paradigm that suppressed, during encoding, verbal rehearsal or attentional refreshing. Neither task removed the effect, ruling out that rehearsal or attentional borrowing is responsible for the advantage conferred from previous to-be-forgotten items. We propose that memory formation depletes a limited resource that recovers over time and that to-be-forgotten items consume fewer resources, leaving more resources available for storing subsequent items. A computational model implementing the theory provided excellent fits to the data.
在本研究中，我们使用项目-方法导向遗忘范式来测试是否遗忘或记住一个项目的指令会影响随后学习项目的记忆。在两个实验中（s 分别为 138 和 33），当在学习期间前面出现一对要忘记的单词对时，回忆的准确性更高。这种效果是累积的：当更多的前导学习项目被遗忘时，表现会提高。当记忆受到出现在学习列表中更远的项目指令的影响时，效果会降低。实验 2 使用了一种双任务范式，在编码期间抑制了言语复述或注意力刷新。这两种任务都没有消除这种效果，排除了复述或注意力借用是由先前要忘记的项目带来的优势的原因。我们提出，记忆形成会耗尽一个随着时间恢复的有限资源，而要忘记的项目消耗的资源更少，为存储后续项目留下更多的可用资源。一个实施该理论的计算模型非常好地拟合了数据。
