Testing the common resource competition hypothesis for inhibition-induced forgetting: direct evidence from lexical materials.

Previous studies have revealed the phenomenon of inhibition-induced forgetting in face materials and hypothesized that the mechanism behind it involves the competition of limited cognitive resources between response inhibition and memory encoding (i.e., the common resource competition hypothesis). The present study attempts to further test the common resource competition hypothesis of inhibition-induced forgetting using lexical materials that can directly manipulate cognitive resource demand. One hundred and thirty participants were recruited and randomly assigned to high-frequency and low-frequency word groups. Participants were required to sequentially complete the “word Go/No-go task” to induce inhibition, the “filler task” to provide encoding-retrieval delay, and the “surprise word recognition task” to measure incidental memory levels. The results showed that in the surprise word recognition task with low-frequency word groups, the recognition level of the no-go cues was significantly lower than that of the go cues, whereas in the high- frequency word groups, the difference in the recognition level of the go and no-go cues was not significant. The results suggest that inhibition-induced forgetting occurs when response inhibition and memory encoding compete for common resources (in low-frequency words), but not when there is no common resource competition (in high-frequency words), further testing the common resource competition hypothesis of inhibition-induced forgetting.