Document Type

Dissertation

Date of Award

1977

Keywords

Memory, Short-term memory

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

C. James Scheirer

Second Advisor

Norman E. Spear

Third Advisor

Richard G. Burright

Abstract

Directed forgetting refers to a class of experimental operations sharing the common characteristic of not requiring recall of some subset of the material presented in a memory experiment. As a research area, it has been plagued by a paradigmization which has hampered efforts to formulate a general theory of the effects of forget cues. Chapter 1 of this paper reviews the literature of directed forgetting with attention to theory and data both between and within paradigms. Of the number of hypotheses about possible mechanisms which were considered, a combination of set differentiation, selective search, and selective rehearsal notions were supported. These are all seen, in turn, as components of a general organizational tendency in memory, to segregate, classify, and differentially process incoming material when these strategies are appropriate to the task.

In Chapter 2 some new directed forgetting data were presented, including demonstration of a previously-undiscovered phenomenon. Under standard Brown-Peterson procedures, Experiment 1 found that simply asking subjects to forget the already-recalled items as they waited for the next trial (during the I.T.I.) improved recall significantly. This effect is particularly interesting because it is purely instructional and seemingly redundant with the obvious demands of the distractor task, yet the strategy is apparently not utilized by “normal” subjects. Subsequent experiments attempted to isolate the possible mechanisms underlying this effect.

Experiment 2 tested a number of implications of an organizational hypothesis, that subjects can reorganize the items in an experimental session such that only the single current item is contained in a to-be-remembered set, while all others are in a not-to-be-remembered one. Such an organization could then be utilized in directing retrieval and reducing proactive interference. Unfortunately, none of the predictions of this hypothesis were supported, although a number of procedural and methodological criticisms may be entertained post hoc. Experiments 3 and 4 focussed on replicating the original effect and contrasting it with a condition where subjects engaged in distractor activity during the I.T.I. The logic of this forgetting hypothesis was that subjects normally engage in interference-generating post-recall processing of items, and the forget cue prevents this. This hypothesis was not supported in a strict sense either. But a modification of it, that subjects may be capable of voluntarily inhibiting retrieval of past (interfering) items was discussed and found consistent with all of the data in this series of experiments, and further research was suggested.

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