ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2016
The representational consequences of intentional forgetting: Impairments to both the probability and fidelity of long-term memory.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Emotional memories are (usually) harder to forget: A meta-analysis of the item-method directed forgetting literature.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Pooled it
- I remember (and forget) your happy smiling face: Directed forgetting of emotionally expressive faces of in-group and out-group members.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Forgetting by any other name: The effect of instruction framing on item-method directed forgetting.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Article
- When does the forgetting of trait-implying behaviors affect subsequent person impressions?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Unexpected Events Resist Directed Forgetting.Journal of cognitive enhancement : towards the integration of theory and practice · 2026Article
- Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Generation (not production) improves the fidelity of visual representations in picture naming.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Neural evidence of deprioritizing to-be-forgotten information in visual working memory.Frontiers in cognition · 2024Article
- The Mechanisms Underlying Interference and Inhibition: A Review of Current Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Forgetting under difficult conditions: Item-method directed forgetting under perceptual processing constraints.Memory & cognition · 2021Article
- Responsible remembering and forgetting as contributors to memory for important information.Memory & cognition · 2021Article
- Indirect modulation of human visual memory.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Retrieval-mediated directed forgetting in the item-method paradigm: the effect of semantic cues.Psychological research · 2020Article
- Comparing Models of the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS) in an Italian Clinical Sample.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Reconsidering unconscious persistence: Suppressing unwanted memories reduces their indirect expression in later thoughts.Cognition · 2019Article
- More Is Less: Increased Processing of Unwanted Memories Facilitates Forgetting.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Article
- Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence for attentional up-regulation, but not down-regulation, when encoding pictures into long-term memory.Memory & cognition · 2019Article
- Decomposing item-method directed forgetting of emotional pictures: Equivalent costs and no benefits.Memory & cognition · 2018Article
- The Biology of Forgetting-A Perspective.Neuron · 2017Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We investigated whether intentional forgetting impacts only the likelihood of later retrieval from long-term memory or whether it also impacts the fidelity of those representations that are successfully retrieved. We accomplished this by combining an item-method directed forgetting task with a testing procedure and modeling approach inspired by the delayed-estimation paradigm used in the study of visual short-term memory (STM). Abstract or concrete colored images were each followed by a remember (R) or forget (F) instruction and sometimes by a visual probe requiring a speeded detection response (E1-E3). Memory was tested using an old-new (E1-E2) or remember-know-no (E3) recognition task followed by a continuous color judgment task (E2-E3); a final experiment included only the color judgment task (E4). Replicating the existing literature, more "old" or "remember" responses were made to R than F items and RTs to postinstruction visual probes were longer following F than R instructions. Color judgments were more accurate for successfully recognized or recollected R than F items (E2-E3); a mixture model confirmed a decrease to both the probability of retrieving the F items as well as the fidelity of the representation of those F items that were retrieved (E4). We conclude that intentional forgetting is an effortful process that not only reduces the likelihood of successfully encoding an item for later retrieval, but also produces an impoverished memory trace even when those items are retrieved; these findings draw a parallel between the control of memory representations within working and long-term memory.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.