Intentional forgetting in humans: memory selection at encoding

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"The Woman Who Can't Forget" is the memoir of Jill Price, whose memory is so comprehensive that it fails to distinguish between "the most dramatic or consequential events" in her life and "the completely banal day-to-day things." She remembers the soup that she ate for lunch on October 19, 1979 as vividly as she remembers the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. While many of us might envy her apparently exceptional memory, Price describes her own condition as a burden. Her story underscores the importance of forgetting for normal memory functioning. While we often associate forgetting with unwanted and sometimes frustrating lapses in memory, when performed intentionally, forgetting operates in the service of memory by allowing us to selectively commit relevant rather than irrelevant items to long-term storage. During my previous NSERC grant, my students and I discovered that enacting a memory intention at encoding initiates a differential withdrawal of attention from to-be-forgotten and to-be-remembered information. In this application for grant renewal, we propose using cognitive behavioural methods with healthy human volunteers to: 1) Investigate the consequences of this attentional withdrawal for subsequent information processing; 2) determine the nature of the memory representation that is formed for to-be-forgotten information that escapes initial selection at encoding; and, 3) discover whether poorer intentional forgetting of negative compared to positive and neutral stimuli is due to effects of emotional valence and/or arousal on attention. By focusing on selection at encoding (rather than retrieval) our research offers unique perspectives both on the role that attention plays in enacting a memory intention and on the consequences of successful and unsuccessful memory selection. In so doing, our work contributes to an understanding of the fundamental cognitive processes involved in the selection and representation of to-be-forgotten and to-be-remembered information in normal human memory.