Control of access to memory: The use of task interference as a behavioral probe

Abstract

Directed forgetting and prospective memory methods were combined to examine differences in the control of memory access. Between studying two lists of target words, participants were either instructed to forget the first list, or to continue remembering the first list. After study participants performed a lexical decision task with an additional requirement to respond with a designated key to targets from one or both of the lists. List discrimination performance supported the assumption that contextual representations associated with the two lists are more differentiated following forget instructions. Test instructions which directed participants towards both lists or to particular list(s) were more or less compatible with these contextual representations. Lexical decisions on non-target trials were slower when test instructions were compatible with study contexts compared to when incompatible, indicating that contexts reinstated by test instructions influenced the complexity of memory access. This finding is most compatible with theories of memory which locate an important component of control at the pre-decision stage.

Prospective memory in an air traffic control simulation: External aids that signal when to act.

“…PAM theory proposes that the costs are due, at least in part, to engagement of preparatory attention, which allows the individual to be prepared to make a decision to respond differently to certain stimuli (Smith et al, 2007). However, the exact nature of those processes has yet to be determined and the existence of a cost can be interpreted in different ways (for discussion see Hicks et al, 2005; Loft, Humphreys, & Whitney, 2008). Nevertheless, costs to ongoing tasks have been demonstrated in a variety of tasks (Smith et al, 2007), including the ATC task in Loft and Remington (2010) and the current experiments.…”

Where is the forgetting with list-method directed forgetting in recognition?

“…Other recent findings provide additional support for this hypothesis. For example, Loft, Humphreys, and Whitney (2008) demonstrated that intentionally forgotten materials interfere more with ongoing task performance under exclusion than inclusion conditions. Also, Gottlob and Golding (2007) found directed forgetting in source monitoring, where in addition to identifying the Old/New status of the words, participants had to retrieve their case/color/list membership.…”

Segregation of study items in memory determines the magnitude and direction of directed forgetting

“…In this study, we did test for memory for identity. Given recent evidence on the importance of source monitoring and inhibitory control in memory (Jacoby, Shimizu, Daniels, & Rhodes, 2005; Loft, Humphreys, & Whitney, 2008), we decided to deviate from accepted practice and test for (a) identity at source as well as for (b) memory for words. Our goal was to examine the relationship between memory for words per se (serving to derive the DFE) and memory for their source at study.…”