Studies of directed ignoring and directed forgetting.

摘要

Directed forgetting, the ability to intentionally discard learned information, has been investigated empirically for over 30 years. However, directed ignoring, the ability to prevent learning from occurring in the first place, has received comparatively little attention. Using directed forgetting research as both a methodological and theoretical framework, the five studies presented here explore the effect of cueing information to be forgotten prior or subsequent to its presentation. We sought to determine the processes that underlie participants' ability to comply with these cues by varying conditions at acquisition (imagery and standard study instructions) retrieval (free recall, recognition and cued recall), and the populations of participants tested (younger and older adults). In so doing, we were successful in replicating the findings of previous directed forgetting studies and extending the results to the directed ignoring paradigm. Our results indicate that, similar to directed forgetting, directed ignoring relies upon a retrieval inhibition mechanism. Specifically, participants cued prior to presentation nonetheless encode information incidentally and then inhibit its retrieval. These findings are discussed in terms of incidental and implicit learning, and more generally, the automaticity of encoding processes.