Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Sci Rep. 2023 Mar 14;13(1):4242. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-31063-3.
Suppressing retrieval of unwanted memories can cause forgetting, an outcome often attributed to the recruitment of inhibitory control. This suppression-induced forgetting (SIF) generalizes to different cues used to test the suppressed content (cue-independence), a property taken as consistent with inhibition. But does cue-independent forgetting necessarily imply that a memory has been inhibited? Tomlinson et al. (Proc Natl Acad Sci 106:15588-15593, 2009) reported a surprising finding that pressing a button also led to cue-independent forgetting, which was taken as support for an alternative interference account. Here we investigated the role of inhibition in forgetting due to retrieval suppression and pressing buttons. We modified Tomlinson et al.'s procedure to examine an unusual feature they introduced that may have caused memory inhibition effects in their experiment: the omission of explicit task-cues. When tasks were uncued, we replicated the button-press forgetting effect; but when cued, pressing buttons caused no forgetting. Moreover, button-press forgetting partially reflects output-interference effects at test and not a lasting effect of interference. In contrast, SIF occurred regardless of these procedural changes. Collectively, these findings indicate that simply pressing a button does not induce forgetting, on its own, without confounding factors that introduce inhibition into the task and that inhibition likely underlies SIF.
抑制无关记忆的提取会导致遗忘，这种结果通常归因于抑制控制的招募。这种抑制诱导的遗忘（SIF）可以推广到用于测试被抑制内容的不同线索（线索独立性），这种特性与抑制一致。但是，线索独立性遗忘是否一定意味着记忆受到了抑制？Tomlinson 等人（Proc Natl Acad Sci 106:15588-15593, 2009）报告了一个令人惊讶的发现，即按下按钮也会导致线索独立性遗忘，这被认为是对替代干扰解释的支持。在这里，我们研究了由于检索抑制和按钮按下导致遗忘的抑制作用。我们修改了 Tomlinson 等人的程序，以研究他们在实验中引入的一个可能导致记忆抑制效应的不寻常特征：明确任务线索的省略。当任务没有线索时，我们复制了按钮按下遗忘效应；但是当有线索时，按下按钮不会导致遗忘。此外，按钮按下遗忘部分反映了测试中的输出干扰效应，而不是干扰的持久效应。相比之下，无论这些程序变化如何，SIF 都会发生。总的来说，这些发现表明，仅仅按下按钮本身并不会导致遗忘，除非任务中引入了抑制等混淆因素，并且抑制很可能是 SIF 的基础。
