Induced Forgetting Is the Result of True Forgetting, Not Shifts in Decision-making Thresholds

Megla, Emma; Woodman, Geoffrey F.; Maxcey, Ashleigh M.

doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01701

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…For example, Tozios and Fukuda (2020) demonstrated that directed forgetting effects may be evidence of solely upregulation of remember-cued items rather than downregulation of forget-cued items. Future work should address whether forget-cued pictures show evidence of true forgetting, perhaps using electrophysiological indices of visual long-term memory ( Megla et al, 2021 ) along the lines of electrophysiological studies of directed forgetting with words ( Burgess et al, 2017 ; Taylor & Hamm, 2018 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directed forgetting of pictures of everyday objects

Scotti

Maxcey

2022

Journal of Vision

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Directed forgetting is a laboratory task in which subjects are explicitly cued to forget certain items and remember others. Volitional control over the contents of memory has been used to study clinical disorders, with successful intentional control of memory being a hallmark of a healthy mind. Yet the degree of volitional forgetting over the content of visual long-term memory is unclear when compared to words. Different kinds of visual stimuli (e.g., abstract symbols, line drawings, scenes) may not equally be susceptible to voluntary control in memory, and intentional forgetting studies have shown both twice as much forgetting of pictures compared to words (think/no-think task) and half as much forgetting of pictures compared to words (directed forgetting task). In the present study, we systematically test volitional control over pictures of everyday objects using item-method directed forgetting procedures. We find that subjects are able to intentionally prioritize memory for pictures cued as to be remembered over pictures cued to be forgotten. Here we show that directed forgetting effects are observed using pictures of everyday objects (albeit to a weaker extent compared to directed forgetting of words), suggesting increased confidence for generalization of directed forgetting literature to real-world applications. However, we caution clinical applications of intentional memory control until the underlying direction causing this effect (upregulation of remember-cued items or downregulation of forget-cued items) is known.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directed forgetting of pictures of everyday objects

Scotti

Maxcey

2022

Journal of Vision

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“…Indeed, Maxcey et al (2021) found this exact pattern when determining the cause of recognitioninduced forgetting (see Section 2.2 for further discussion of recognition-induced forgetting), although different evidence suggests this theory may not account for this forgetting effect (Maxcey et al, 2019;Megla et al, 2021). One can also imagine the importance of considering memorability in many real-world scenarios, such as the effect of face memorability when choosing who to put in a line-up for eyewitness testimony (Bainbridge, 2017).…”

Section: Consistency In What People Remembermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though both related and baseline objects are studied the same number of times during these experiments, participants have much worse memory for related objects than for baseline objects. Interestingly, the difference in memory between these object types can even be seen in neural activity, with related objects having a suppressed FN400-an event-related potential (ERP) component associated with familiarity and memory-compared to baseline objects (Megla et al, 2021). Though this within-category forgetting has most often been studied with everyday objects (e.g., Fukuda et al, 2020;Maxcey & Woodman, 2014), it has also been found to occur with words (Maxcey et al, 2019) and faces (though with some caveats; Rugo et al, 2017).…”

Section: When Items Look Alikementioning

confidence: 99%

Interaction of Perception and Memory

Megla¹,

Bainbridge²

2023

Preprint

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Whereas visual perception is the interpretation of the light that enters the retina of the eye, long-term memory is the encoding, storage, and retrieval of perceptual experiences and learned information. Although these are separable processes, they continuously interact and influence each other. For example, the underlying perceptual features of an image result in large consistency in whether people will remember or forget it, and the visual similarities that images share can influence how well they will be remembered. The exaggeration of visual features, such as enlarged eyes on a face, can lead to enhanced memory, and a build-up in perceptual experience can also improve memory. In addition to perception influencing memory, memory also influences perception. Familiarity with an object or object category can result in enhanced perceptual processing, or even lead to the stimuli “looking” different than they otherwise would. Additionally, learning a new category of objects changes how we perceive its categorical members, and even members of different, related categories. Perception and memory are closely intertwined in the brain as well, with mechanisms that allow similar perceptual items to be distinguished in memory, but also support incomplete perceptual details to be filled in from memory. Additionally, there are divisions in the brain dedicated to the perceptual and mnemonic processing of different object categories, such as faces and scenes. In other words, there are widespread examples in which memory and perception influence each other, with neural mechanisms and areas set in place to deal with these complex interactions.

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“…Rarely do we consider the effect of accessing memory representations on our memories of other semantically related objects. However, when we recognize an object, we appear to become less able to remember other objects from the same category (e.g., Maxcey, 2016; Maxcey & Woodman, 2014; Megla et al 2021). For example, consider a scenario in which you select a number of objects from the same category (e.g., berries on a bush, flowers in a garden) and store those selected objects in memory until you are able to return to them.…”

Section: Output Interferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Induced forgetting of pictures across shifts in context.

Maxcey¹,

León²,

Janakiefski³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Previous research from our lab has shown that recognizing an object stored in visual long-term memory leads to the forgetting of related objects. Here we ask whether context, an integral aspect to modern models of memory, plays a role in induced forgetting. We manipulated the activated context at test, both externally (e.g., changes in testing room) and internally (e.g., 1 hr and 24 hr later). We found that only interfering with the ability to internally reinstate context after 24 hr eliminated induced forgetting. Thus, we demonstrate that mental context reinstatement plays a role in induced forgetting and specify that models of memory should incorporate internal context reinstatement as an underlying factor of forgetting. We also propose a process model of induced forgetting, discuss limitations of laboratory-based memory tasks, and offer a new term, induced suppression, to collectively describe this robust phenomenon. Public Significance StatementContext plays a substantial role in many models of recognition memory. In 1 such model, forgetting is entirely due to context. The present article sought to test the hypothesis that changes in contextual retrieval underlie forgetting in laboratory-induced forgetting of pictures of real-world objects. We manipulated both spatial and temporal context and found that forgetting survived changes in space, but not changes in time. Induced forgetting was brought back online when the practice phase, which induces forgetting, was also delayed 1 hr and 24 hr. The elimination of induced forgetting after 24 hr appears to be accounted for by models of forgetting that incorporate a role of context, and difficult to account for otherwise. We conclude by presenting a process model of recognition-induced forgetting and suggest that induced forgetting is better characterized as induced suppression.

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Induced Forgetting Is the Result of True Forgetting, Not Shifts in Decision-making Thresholds

Cited by 6 publications

References 66 publications

Directed forgetting of pictures of everyday objects

Directed forgetting of pictures of everyday objects

Interaction of Perception and Memory

Induced forgetting of pictures across shifts in context.

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