Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control
Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control
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DOI：
10.1038/35066572
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发表时间：
2001-03-15
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Green, C
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Anderson, MC;Green, C
弗洛伊德提出，不想要的记忆可以通过将它们推入无意识中来忘记，这一过程称为压抑（1）。世纪以来，压抑的存在一直存在争议，部分原因是它与创伤的强烈耦合，以及在受控实验中研究这种过程的伦理和实践困难。然而，对记忆和注意力的行为和神经生物学研究表明，人们有执行控制过程，旨在最大限度地减少知觉分心（2，3），克服短期和长期记忆任务（3-7）期间的干扰，并停止对刺激的强烈习惯性反应（8-13）。在这里，我们表明，这些机制可以被招募，以防止不需要的陈述性记忆进入意识，这种认知行为具有持久的后果，被拒绝的记忆。当人们遇到提示他们不想要的记忆时，他们总是试图阻止意识到它，后来回忆被拒绝的记忆变得更加困难。遗忘会随着记忆被回避的次数而增加，会抵制准确回忆的激励，并且是由抑制记忆本身的过程引起的。这些结果表明，执行控制过程并不是唯一与创伤联系在一起的，可能为压抑提供了一个可行的模型。
Freud proposed that unwanted memories can be forgotten by pushing them into the unconscious, a process called repression(1). The existence of repression has remained controversial for more than a century, in part because of its strong coupling with trauma, and the ethical and practical difficulties of studying such processes in controlled experiments. However, behavioural and neurobiological research on memory and attention shows that people have executive control processes directed at minimizing perceptual distraction(2,3), overcoming interference during short and long-term memory tasks(3-7) and stopping strong habitual responses to stimuli(8-13). Here we show that these mechanisms can be recruited to prevent unwanted declarative memories from entering awareness, and that this cognitive act has enduring consequences for the rejected memories. When people encounter cues that remind them of an unwanted memory and they consistently try to prevent awareness of it, the later recall of the rejected memory becomes more difficult. The forgetting increases with the number of times the memory is avoided, resists incentives for accurate recall and is caused by processes that suppress the memory itself. These results show that executive control processes not uniquely tied to trauma may provide a viable model for repression.