ArticleMemory & cognition2021
Responsible remembering and forgetting as contributors to memory for important information.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Memory accessibility as a cue for perceived importance.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Encoding Effort Eliminates the Animacy Advantage in Memory When Manipulated with Value-Directed Remembering.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Value-Directed Remembering: A Dual-Process Perspective.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Point Values on Scoring Rubrics Influence Self-Regulated Learning for STEM Material.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The perceived importance of words in large font guides learning and selective memory.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Age-related differences in selective associative memory: implications for responsible remembering.Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition · 2024Article
- Read carefully, because this is important! How value-driven strategies impact sentence memory.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Value-directed learning: Schematic reward structure facilitates learning.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Age-related differences in memory when offloading important information.Psychology and aging · 2023Article
- Responsible attention: the effect of divided attention on metacognition and responsible remembering.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Younger and older adults' strategic use of associative memory and metacognitive control when learning foreign vocabulary words of varying importance.Psychology and aging · 2023Article
- Differential effects of proactive and retroactive interference in value-directed remembering for younger and older adults.Psychology and aging · 2022Article
- Framing effects in value-directed remembering.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- The effect of perceptual processing fluency and value on metacognition and remembering.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- Can People Intentionally and Selectively Forget Prose Material?Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Metamemory that matters: judgments of importance can engage responsible remembering.Memory (Hove, England) · 2021Article
- Age-Related Differences in Framing Selective Memory in Terms of Gains and Losses.Experimental aging researchArticle
- Age-Related Differences in Overcoming Interference When Selectively Remembering Important Information.Experimental aging researchArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
The ability to control both what we remember and what is forgotten can enhance memory. The present study used an item-method directed forgetting paradigm to investigate whether participants strategically remembered items they were responsible for remembering rather than items a hypothetical friend was responsible for remembering. Specifically, participants were presented with a 20-word list (either unrelated words or items to pack for a camping trip) with each word followed by a cue indicating whether the participant (You) or their "friend" (Friend) was responsible for remembering the word. When asked to recall all of the words, regardless of the cue, recall was sensitive to the You and Friend instructions such that participants demonstrated elevated recall for the items they were responsible for remembering, and participants also strategically organized retrieval by recalling You items before Friend items. Additionally, when asked to judge the importance of remembering each item, participants' recall and recognition were sensitive to item importance regardless of cue. Taken together, the present experiments revealed that the strategic encoding of important information and the forgetting of less important, goal-irrelevant information can maximize memory utility and minimize negative consequences for forgetting. Thus, we provide evidence for a metacognitive process we are calling responsible forgetting, where people attempt to forget less consequential information and focus on remembering what is most important.
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