Human attention and memory

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Forgetting is often viewed as a failure of memory.  We lament misplaced items, missed appointments, and past experiences that cannot be brought immediately to mind.  In his popular psychology book, Daniel Schacter describes the transience that characterizes forgetting as one of the "seven sins of memory."  But forgetting is not always a failure of memory.  Instead, forgetting often works in the service of memory.  By expunging irrelevant, incorrect, or outdated information, intentional forgetting enables us to focus our limited cognitive resources on relevant, correct, and current information. While it is true that we attempt to limit the encoding and retrieval of to-be-forgotten information, we do not achieve this through simple decay of the item representations or their memory traces.  Instead, we use active attentional mechanisms to limit input and output interference from to-be-forgotten information.  The goal of my work is to explore the nature of these attentional mechanisms and to determine how they subserve forgetting.  I am especially interested in the role that attentional inhibition plays in preventing to-be-forgotten information from being stored in long term memory. By employing cognitive behavioural methods with healthy human volunteers, my research will generate knowledge about how the intention to forget is instantiated in behaviour.  This is a unique perspective because rather than focusing exclusively on the question of how attention operates in the service of remembering, it addresses the equally important issue of how attention operates in the service of forgetting.  Especially given the fact that difficulties in forgetting are implicated in general memory impairments as well as in some clinical disorders, this knowledge will contribute to cognitive models of normal as well as impaired memory function.