The 20th annual Symposium will be held on Thursday, April 23, 2009.

Directed Forgetting of Real-Life Events in Young Adults
Poster Session-Science Complex Atrium, 4:00 PM

Kaycee  Rashid,   '09 84
   Major: Psychology
   Hometown: Midland, MI

Sponsor(s): Holger B. Elischberger, Tammy J. Jechura
Support:  

Abstract: 
Directed Forgetting (DF) is poor memory for information one was instructed to forget relative to information one was instructed to remember. Extant DF literature has focused almost exclusively on memory for word lists, and the current project investigated whether the findings from these studies apply to memory for real-life events. Participants were told that the purpose of the study was to examine the ease of learning two novel research procedures (the “events”), one to study sleep deprivation, the other to study creativity. The procedures were similar in structure and duration (20 minutes), and included a variety of actions and props (e.g., attaching EEG leads; interpreting ink blot images). Participants were instructed to forget one of the two procedures immediately after learning about it under the guise that the experimenter had administered it erroneously.

After a one-week delay, participants were asked to recall everything they remembered about both events. Preliminary analyses of the interviews suggest that DF is a phenomenon which can, to some extent, be observed in memory for real-life events. For instance, levels of correct recall were significantly higher for the to-be-remembered (M = 10.50, SD = 5.09) than the to-be-forgotten (M = 8.93, SD = 4.63) event at the open-ended level of questioning (e.g., Tell me everything you remember about the sleep deprivation procedure). In contrast, total correct recall, including information given in response to specific questions, showed no effects of the forget instruction (TBR: M = 27.60, SD = 4.26; TBF: M = 26.29, SD = 4.13).

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