ArticleMemory (Hove, England)2017
Successfully controlling intrusive memories is harder when control must be sustained.
Article in Memory (Hove, England), 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
- Efficacy of stimulus discrimination training for reducing unwanted memories in student journalists.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Trial
- From trigger to response: an ecological momentary study of intrusive memory sequences in PTSD and complex PTSD.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- The effectiveness and adaptiveness of suppressing unwanted thoughts.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Memory control deficits in the sleep-deprived human brain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Long-lasting negativity in the left motoric brain structures during word memory inhibition in the Think/No-Think paradigm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Index of Intrusion Control (IIC): Capturing individual variability in intentional intrusion control in the laboratory.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the Think/No-Think task, but forgot to ask.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- How do the sleep features that characterise depression impact memory?Emerging topics in life sciences · 2023Review
- Controlling intrusive thoughts of future fears under stress.Neurobiology of stress · 2023Article
- On the role of inhibition in suppression-induced forgetting.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- EEG evidence that morally relevant autobiographical memories can be suppressed.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Prefrontal-hippocampal interactions supporting the extinction of emotional memories: the retrieval stopping model.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
- Task compliance predicts suppression-induced forgetting in a large sample.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Forgetting Unwanted Memories: Active Forgetting and Implications for the Development of Psychological Disorders.Journal of personalized medicine · 2021Review
- Simulating thoughts to measure and study internal attention in mental health.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Losing Control: Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2021Article
- Long-term modulation of cardiac activity induced by inhibitory control over emotional memories.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Preventing a Thought from Coming to Mind Elicits Increased Right Frontal Beta Just as Stopping Action Does.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2019Article
- What doesn't kill you makes you stronger: Psychological trauma and its relationship to enhanced memory control.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
After unpleasant events, people often experience intrusive memories that undermine their peace of mind. In response, they often suppress these unwanted memories from awareness. Such efforts may fail, however, when inhibitory control demands are high due to the need to sustain control, or when fatigue compromises inhibitory capacity. Here we examined how sustained inhibitory demand affected intrusive memories in the Think/No-Think paradigm. To isolate intrusions, participants reported, trial-by-trial, whether their preceding attempt to suppress retrieval had triggered retrieval of the memory they intended to suppress. Such counter-intentional retrievals provide a laboratory model of the sort of involuntary retrieval that may underlie intrusive memories. Using this method, we found that longer duration trials increased the probability of an intrusion. Moreover, on later No-Think trials, control over intrusions suddenly declined, with longer trial durations triggering more relapses of items that had been previously been purged. Thus, the challenges of controlling retrieval appear to cause a decline in control over time, due to a change in state, such as fatigue. These findings raise the possibility that characteristics often true of people with psychiatric disorders - such as compromised sleep, and increased demand on control - may contribute to difficulties in suppressing intrusive memories.
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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.