Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL 61820, United States; Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, United States.
Neuroimage. 2021 Jul 15;235:117983. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117983. Epub 2021 Mar 21.
Contextual information plays a critical role in directed forgetting (DF) of lists of items, whereas DF of individual items has been primarily associated with item-level processing. This study was designed to investigate whether context processing also contributes to the forgetting of individual items. Participants first viewed a series of words, with task-irrelevant scene images (used as "context tags") interspersed between them. Later, these words reappeared without the scenes and were followed by an instruction to remember or forget that word. Multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data revealed that the reactivation of context information associated with the studied words (i.e., scene-related activity) was greater whereas the item-related information diminished after a forget instruction compared to a remember instruction. Critically, we found the magnitude of the separation between item information and context information predicted successful forgetting. These results suggest that the unbinding of an item from its context may support the intention to forget, and more generally they establish that contextual processing indeed contributes to item-method DF.
语境信息在定向遗忘（DF）中起着至关重要的作用，而项目水平的处理主要与项目的遗忘有关。本研究旨在探讨语境处理是否也有助于遗忘单个项目。参与者首先观看了一系列单词，单词之间穿插着与任务不相关的场景图像（用作“语境标签”）。之后，这些单词再次出现，没有场景，然后是一个记住或忘记该单词的指令。 fMRI 数据的多变量模式分析显示，与学习单词相关的语境信息的重新激活（即与场景相关的活动）在遗忘指令后比在记住指令后更大，而与项目相关的信息则减少。关键是，我们发现项目信息和语境信息之间分离的幅度可以预测成功的遗忘。这些结果表明，从语境中分离项目可能有助于遗忘的意图，更普遍地说，它们确立了语境处理确实有助于项目方法的 DF。
