What can directed forgetting tell us about clinical populations?

Delaney, Peter F.; Barden, Eileen; Smith, W. G.; Wisco, Blair E.

doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2020.101926

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…In contrast to previous paradigms [ 23 , 24 , 102 ], we did not direct participants, nor were we able to incentivize them, to avoid thinking a particular thought. Rather, feedback and monetary bonus depended on participants’ reported responses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Here we examined the extent to which people deal with thoughts that are inconsistent with current goals by proactively reducing their ’volume’ such that they will not come to mind. This possibility has been inspired by the intentional forgetting literature, suggesting that people can successfully weaken artificial associations learned in the lab, without requiring extensive ’suppression practice’ [ 21 , 23 , 24 ]. Our results indicated that people mostly engage in reactive thought control, stopping unwanted thoughts after they occur.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The experience of uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts is strongly implicated in many psychiatric disorders [ 2 , 74 , 75 ], yet studies of clinical populations measuring actual (as opposed to self-reported) control over thoughts and memories have produced mixed results [ 24 , 76 , 77 ]. The current work can advance the understanding of how thought control is impaired in clinical populations by focusing on the latent, computational mechanisms that enable it.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The typical finding is reduced memory of suppressed words on a later recall test. Although it is still debated whether this reduced memory reflects interference, weakening of associative binding, or weakening of the memory itself [ 24 – 27 ], these findings imply that people can intentionally weaken the strength of associations formed in the lab. Critically, evidence for intentional forgetting of long-term (e.g., autobiographical) memories has been either absent [ 28 ] or limited to paradigms wherein such memories were linked to unrelated cues in the lab [ 29 – 31 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

If you don’t let it in, you don’t have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts

Fradkin

Eldar²

2022

PLoS Comput Biol

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To attain goals, people must proactively prevent interferences and react to interferences once they occur. Whereas most research focuses on how people deal with external interferences, here we investigate the use of proactive and reactive control in dealing with unwanted thoughts. To examine this question, we asked people to generate an association to each of several repeating cue words, while forbidding the repetition of associations. Reactively rejecting and replacing unwanted repeated associations after they occur entails slower response times. Conversely, proactive control entails constricting the search space and thus faster response times. To gain further insight into different potential proactive thought control mechanisms, we augmented the analysis of raw response times with a novel, hypothesis-based, tractable computational model describing how people serially sample associations. Our results indicate that people primarily react to unwanted thoughts after they occur. Yet, we found evidence for two latent proactive control mechanisms: one that allows people to mitigate the episodic strengthening of repeated thoughts, and another that helps avoid looping in a repetitive thought. Exploratory analysis showed a relationship between model parameters and self-reported individual differences in the control over unwanted thoughts in daily life. The findings indicate the novel task and model can advance our understanding of how people can and cannot control their thoughts and memories, and benefit future research on the mechanisms responsible for unwanted thought in different psychiatric conditions. Finally, we discuss implications concerning the involvement of associative thinking and various control processes in semantic fluency, decision-making and creativity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

If you don’t let it in, you don’t have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts

Fradkin

Eldar²

2022

PLoS Comput Biol

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“…For example, students ask professors if material will be on the exam to determine what they can forget, and judges direct juries to disregard information that was inappropriately introduced into a trial. The ability to volitionally forget has been characterized as a hallmark of well-being that is impaired in anxious and depressed individuals ( Hauswald & Kissler, 2008 ; Stramaccia et al, 2021 ), and intentional forgetting tasks have often been used to study cognitive effects of clinical disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder ( Delaney et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

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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Do we remember when to better recall what? Repetition benefits are probably not due to explicit temporal context memory

Adams

Delaney

2023

Journal of Memory and Language

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What can directed forgetting tell us about clinical populations?

Cited by 14 publications

References 92 publications

If you don’t let it in, you don’t have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts

If you don’t let it in, you don’t have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts

Directed forgetting of pictures of everyday objects

Do we remember when to better recall what? Repetition benefits are probably not due to explicit temporal context memory

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