The Role of Inhibitory Control in Forgetting Unwanted Memories: A Consideration of Three Methods

Abstract

Summary. When confronted with reminders to things that we would prefer not to think about, we often attempt to put the unwanted memories out of awareness. Here, I argue that the ability to control memory is a special case of a broad class of situations thought to require executive control: response override. In such situations, one must stop a strong habitual response to a stimulus due to situational demands, a function thought to be accomplished by inhibitory processes that suppress the response, enabling more flexible, context-sensitive control over behavior. Recent behavioral studies show that inhibitory mechanisms that control overt behavior are also targeted at declarative memories to control retrieval. Recent neuroimaging findings (Anderson et al., 2004) further establish that controlling awareness of unwanted memories is associated with increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation, reduced hippocampal activation, and impaired retention of the unwanted trace and that the magnitude of activation in prefrontal cortex predicts memory suppression. These findings indicate that cognitive and neural systems that support our ability to override prepotent responses can be recruited to override declarative memory retrieval, and that this cognitive act leads to memory failure. The relation between these findings and those obtained with the directed forgetting procedure is also discussed.

List-method directed forgetting: The forget cue improves both encoding and retrieval of postcue information

“…Actually, bin selection did not affect the results, being the same when the data were analyzed with a three-bin selection. In none of the analyses reported in the results section was list 1 or list 2 included as a factor (see Anderson, 2005, for a discussion of confounding variables when comparing list 1 and list 2 recall in a withinparticipants design of list-method directed forgetting).…”

A progress report on the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting

“…One of the key characteristics of M. C. Anderson's account is that Rp-items are inhibited at the level of their representation. According to this view, retrievalinduced forgetting is caused by the direct inhibition of Rp-items and not by damaging particular cue-response associations (for other reviews of the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting, see M. C. Anderson, 2005;Bäuml, Pastötter, & Hanslmayr, 2010;E. L. Bjork, Bjork, & Anderson, 1998;Levy & Anderson, 2002;Storm, 2011b;Verde, 2012).…”

Towards a Cognitive and Neurobiological Model of Motivated Forgetting

“…We would like to suggest the possibility that these tasks may all be viewed as engaging cognitive control, but perhaps targeted at different types of representations and processes. According to this fl exible control hypothesis (Anderson, 2005 ) , response override mechanisms may be fl exibly targeted at different stages of memory, and at different processes. Item method directed forgetting may be a case of encoding suppression ; list-method directed forgetting may refl ect temporal context suppression ; and negative control effects may refl ect retrieval suppression , as we have discussed.…”