Motivated Forgetting

What is motivated forgetting?

Motivated forgetting is forgetting influenced by goals to limit access to unwanted information. It includes processes studied through deliberate attempts to stop retrieval or to deprioritize material during learning. It is not an exact synonym for unconscious repression of trauma.

An experimental example

Anderson and Green (2001) found that repeatedly suppressing retrieval in a laboratory task made later recall more difficult. Anderson and Hanslmayr (2014) review control processes that may contribute to such effects.

The think/no-think procedure

The think/no-think procedure begins with learning pairs of items: the first is a cue for remembering the second. Participants then see some cues with an instruction to recall their partners and others with an instruction to keep their partners out of awareness. Some learned pairs are left out of this phase as a baseline.

Later, everyone is asked to recall the targets, including those they previously tried not to retrieve. Researchers compare recall for retrieved, suppressed and baseline items. A disadvantage for suppressed items relative to baseline is informative because it goes beyond simply missing the benefit of retrieval practice. This is deliberate control in a defined laboratory task, with known material and instructions.

Limits of the laboratory evidence

These findings do not establish that traumatic experiences are routinely blocked from awareness and later return accurately as nightmares or flashbacks. Claims about fully repressed and recovered autobiographical memories remain disputed; Otgaar and colleagues (2019) review that controversy. Neither remembering nor failing to remember, by itself, establishes what happened in a particular case.

Directed forgetting examines how instructions to forget affect later memory.