Directed Forgetting

Directed forgetting is a laboratory effect: people tend to remember less information when they have been told to forget it than when they have been told to remember it.

Directed forgetting paradigms: item and list methods

Researchers give these instructions in two main ways. In the item method, a remember or forget cue follows each item. In the list method, the forget instruction follows an initial list, commonly before participants learn a second list.

Basden, Basden and Gargano (1993) found different recall and recognition patterns across the two methods. The instruction can affect how information is learned and how it is retrieved later.

How might a forget instruction work?

Item method: rehearsal and encoding

The timing of the cue matters. In the item method, a cue arrives while a person can still choose whether to rehearse that item. Remember cues may encourage further rehearsal and stronger encoding; forget cues may stop that extra processing. A later difference in memory can therefore begin during learning.

List method: retrieval

In the list method, people have already studied the first list before receiving the cue. One proposed explanation is retrieval inhibition: the instruction makes that list harder to access later, rather than simply preventing it from being learned. In Basden and colleagues' experiments, forgetting appeared on recognition tests for the item method but not the list method. Testing recognition also reduced the list-method forgetting effect on subsequent recall.

These different patterns help researchers compare explanations. They do not show that every forget cue works through one mechanism, or that inaccessible information has been permanently removed.

Why it matters

Instructions can change what people recall, but lower recall does not mean a memory has been erased.

Compare an instruction to forget with motivated forgetting, where goals or emotional concerns influence what is forgotten.