Chalkia Anastasia, Vanhasbroeck Niels, Van Oudenhove Lukas, Kindt Merel, Beckers Tom
Centre for the Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology, Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences, Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Commun Psychol. 2023 Oct 10;1(1):24. doi: 10.1038/s44271-023-00024-x.
Memory is susceptible to voluntary disruption, for instance, through directed forgetting manipulations, in which people are cued to intentionally "forget" information. Until now, directed forgetting has been primarily studied for declarative memory performance. Here, we demonstrate that directed forgetting can also disrupt associative memories acquired through fear conditioning. In two experiments, participants showed poorer recognition and recall of images paired with electric shocks when instructed to forget, compared to when instructed to remember them. Further, they also showed weaker skin conductance responses to images paired with shocks that they were instructed to forget, despite repeated, full reinforcement of the aversive outcome. Our findings provide evidence for the effect of directed forgetting not only on declarative but also physiological read-outs of emotional memory, thereby suggesting that forgetting instructions can be applied to interfere with emotional associative memory.
记忆容易受到有意干扰，例如，通过定向遗忘操作，即提示人们有意“忘记”信息。到目前为止，定向遗忘主要是针对陈述性记忆表现进行研究的。在此，我们证明定向遗忘也会干扰通过恐惧条件作用获得的联想记忆。在两项实验中，与被指示记住与电击配对的图像相比，参与者在被指示忘记时对这些图像的识别和回忆较差。此外，尽管对厌恶结果进行了反复、充分的强化，但他们对被指示忘记的与电击配对的图像的皮肤电导率反应也较弱。我们的研究结果为定向遗忘不仅对陈述性记忆而且对情绪记忆的生理读出产生影响提供了证据，从而表明遗忘指令可用于干扰情绪联想记忆。
