Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Friday Noon Posters 2021–2027
(2021)
Is Retrieval Success a Necessary Condition for Retrieval-Induced
Forgetting? BENJAMIN C. STORM, JOHN F. NESTOJKO, ROBERT
A. BJORK, & ELIZABETH LIGON BJORK, UCLA—When information
is retrieved from memory, it becomes more recallable than it
would have been otherwise. Other information associated with the
same cue or configuration of cues, however, becomes less recallable.
Such retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994)
appears to reflect the suppression of competing nontarget information,
which, in turn, may facilitate the selection of target information. But
is success at such selection a necessary condition for retrieval-induced
forgetting? Using a procedure in which some cues pose an impossible
retrieval task for participants, we have obtained evidence that the
attempt to retrieve, even if unsuccessful, can produce retrievalinduced
forgetting. This finding, we believe, lends additional support
for the suppression/inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting.
(2022)
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting in Relation to Study Time, Gender, and
Time of Day. IAN M. MCDONOUGH, BETHANY J. CAUGHEY,
JERLYN M. TOLENTINO, ELIZABETH LIGON BJORK, & ROBERT
A. BJORK, UCLA—Retrieving information from memory, while increasing
the later accessibility of that information, can result in the
reduced accessibility of other information associated to the same cue
or configuration of cues (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). Via a
meta-analysis of four experiments involving over 300 UCLA undergraduates,
we examined whether retrieval-induced forgetting might
relate to three factors: study time, time of day, and gender of participants.
Our findings suggest that retrieval-induced forgetting (1) decreases
as study time increases, (2) may be greater for female than for
male participants, and (3) might be greater for participants tested in
the morning than for participants tested in the afternoon. In our view,
the observed negative relationship between study time and amount of
retrieval-induced forgetting reflects, at least in part, the additional opportunities
afforded for elaborative encoding and integration of the
studied materials as study time increases.
(2023)
Distinctive Experiences Can Cause Forgetting. JASON P. LEBOE,
MELISSA VICKAR, & TIFFANY HELGASON, University of Manitoba—According
to a retrieval inhibition account (Anderson & Spellman,
1998), retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) occurs because the effort
to bring one category exemplar to mind requires inhibition of
related exemplars. The outcome is that participants have more difficulty
recalling related, unpracticed items during a later test. We investigated
whether distinctive encoding alone might heighten forgetting
of related exemplars. At study, some exemplars from a subset of
categories were presented as anagrams (anagram exemplars), while
the other half were merely read (read-related exemplars). Participants
also read all exemplars from the remaining categories (read-unrelated
exemplars). At test, read-related exemplars were less likely to be recalled
than read-unrelated exemplars. Since an anagram’s meaning is
unknown prior to arriving at its solution, retrieval inhibition could not
contribute to forgetting in our study. We suggest that RIF may reflect
a more general influence of distinctive experiences in reducing access
to related, less-distinctive memory representations.
(2024)
Retrieval-Induced Forgetting of Perceptual Memory Representations.
GINO CAMP, DIANE PECHER, HENK G. SCHMIDT, & JAN W.
VAN STRIEN, Erasmus University Rotterdam—Retrieval-induced forgetting
(RIF) has been demonstrated with the retrieval-practice paradigm
if, during both retrieval-practice phase and test phase, tasks are
used that rely on processing of conceptual properties of the stimuli.
Anderson (2003) predicts similar results if both the retrieval-practice
phase and the test phase involve orthographic tasks that rely on processing
of perceptual properties of the stimuli. In three experiments,
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we used different combinations of orthographic tasks in the retrievalpractice
phase and the test phase. We did not find RIF in any of these
experiments. The implications of these results for the scope of RIF in
memory retrieval will be discussed.
(2025)
What Makes Things More Forgettable in Directed Forgetting?
LILI SAHAKYAN, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, &
LEILANI B. GOODMON, University of South Florida (sponsored by
Lili Sahakyan)—Despite extensive research on directed forgetting
showing that recall is impaired as a result of instructions to forget previously
studied information, the role of preexisting item characteristics
known to affect memorability has been overlooked. For example,
research shows that items have a memory advantage when they have
smaller neighborhoods of associates (set size), more densely connected
neighborhoods (connectivity), and greater numbers of resonating
links (resonance) (Nelson & McEvoy, 2004). The present experiments
investigated the effects of the aforementioned item
characteristics on the magnitude of directed forgetting. In contrast to
prior directed forgetting studies that used free recall and recognition,
an extralist cued recall test was used to determine whether (1) directed
forgetting can be obtained with this method and (2) whether the
strength of the cues moderates the magnitude of directed forgetting.
Results revealed that preexisting item characteristics, as well as the
strength of the cues, influence the directed forgetting effect.
(2026)
Directed Forgetting in the List Method Affects Recognition Memory
for Context. LAWRENCE R. GOTTLOB & JONATHAN M.
GOLDING, University of Kentucky—The effects of list method directed
forgetting on recognition memory were explored. In each of
two experiments, two lists of 10 words were presented. After List 1,
half of the participants (F) were instructed that they were to forget
List 1; the other half (R) were not given the forget instruction. Two
types of recognition performance were measured: lexical recognition,
which was recognition of the list words, and context recognition,
which was recognition of the list words plus encoding context. In Experiment
1, the encoding context was the type cases of the words, and
in Experiment 2, it was the colors of the words. In both experiments,
there was an effect of directed forgetting on context recognition, but
not on lexical recognition. The forget instruction affected the
strengths of the memory representations for the word contexts, which
would be consistent with various mechanisms for directed forgetting,
including differential rehearsal and context change.
(2027)
Electrophysiological Correlates of Voluntary Suppression of Episodic
Retrieval. ZARA M. BERGSTROM, ALAN RICHARDSON-
KLAVEHN, MAX VELMANS, & JAN DE FOCKERT, Goldsmiths
College, University of London—We investigated neurocognitive
processes of voluntary retrieval suppression in the Anderson and
Green (2001) “think/no-think” paradigm, in which participants either
retrieve or suppress a previously exposed paired associate. Eventrelated
potentials during the “think/no-think” phase were separated on
the basis of previous learning success versus failure. This separation
yielded a temporal and topographic dissociation between the neural
correlates of a retrieve versus suppress strategy (from 200 to 400 msec
poststimulus), which was independent of learned/not-learned status,
and the neural correlates of item-specific retrieval versus suppression
(from 500 to 700 msec). For the latter, the late left parieto-temporal
positivity indexing recollection was abolished by voluntary suppression
of successfully learned items. We also demonstrate the oscillatory
correlates of these effects, examined using wavelet and partial
least-squares analysis. The data show an electrophysiological separation
between retrieval attempt and retrieval success and show that the
late positive recollection effect is not automatically generated to cues
associated with recollectable responses.