Controlling the contents of memory: Intentional forgetting at encoding

*I.背景*“人们总是在谈论记住东西有多难--他们把钥匙忘在哪里了，或者熟人的名字--但从来没有人谈论过我们为遗忘付出了多大的努力。”--史蒂芬·卡彭特*我的实验室确实谈到了这一点。*我和我的学生们对故意遗忘着迷--人们故意忘记一些东西，以致力于长期记忆，而抛弃其他东西。我们的研究首次证明，刻意忘记不想要的信息最初比刻意记忆更费力。我们认为，这一努力与主动将注意力从被遗忘的物品上撤回有关，这也损害了对附近其他物品的处理。我们已经确定了个体差异，这些差异使一些人在故意遗忘方面比其他人更糟糕，同时也显示出故意忘记在各种情绪和中性刺激下出人意料地健壮。我们进一步揭示，当刻意遗忘失败，并对不想要的信息形成长期记忆时，产生的记忆痕迹与原本应该记住的项目不同。*目标和方法*我们将继续在这一卓有成效的研究项目的基础上，应用注意力和记忆文献中的方法来研究年轻人的刻意遗忘。我们计划实现三个目标：*1.描述在形成的心理表征中发生的对空间的注意力变化：*A.自下而上(通过视觉呈现)。要做到这一点，我们将分析手和眼睛在获取遵循记住或忘记指令的视觉目标时所采取的运动路径。*B.自上而下(通过激活概念关联)。要做到这一点，我们将利用具身认知原理来揭示遵循记住和忘记指令的空间联系的变化。*2.根据记住和忘记的指令，描述注意力可获得性随时间而不是在空间发生的变化。*3.探索忘记的意图是否会让参与者对要忘记的物品感到更负面，如果是这样的话，这些评估是否持续了足够长的时间来改变随后的思考和决策。3.这项研究的新颖性和重要性是所有认知系统的两个基本问题--选择和表征。使用记忆系统作为认知系统的模型，我们将对长期记忆的选择是如何实现的，这种选择的表征水平(S)，以及这种选择对情绪评估的影响提供独特的见解。通过这样做，我们的研究将产生关于记忆、注意力、运动和情绪系统如何在正常人类认知中相互作用以实现和反映对长期记忆内容的控制的新知识。

>>***I. BACKGROUND***“People always talk about how hard it can be to remember things – where they left their keys, or the name of an acquaintance – but no one ever talks about how much effort we put into forgetting." - Stephen Carpenter******My lab does talk about this.******My students and I are fascinated by intentional forgetting – forgetting that people do on purpose to select some items for commitment to long-term memory and to discard others. Our research was the first to demonstrate that intentionally forgetting unwanted information is initially more effortful than intentionally remembering. We have argued that this effort is related to an active withdrawal of attention from to-be-forgotten items that also impairs processing of other nearby items. We have identified individual differences that make some people worse at intentionally forgetting than others, while also showing intentional forgetting to be surprisingly robust across a variety of emotional and neutral stimuli. We have further revealed that when intentional forgetting fails and a long-term memory is formed for unwanted information, the resulting memory trace is different than for items that were meant to be remembered.******II. OBJECTIVES AND APPROACH****We will continue to build on this fruitful program of research by applying methods from the attention and memory literature to study intentional forgetting in young adults. We plan to attain three objectives:******1. Characterize changes in attention to space that occur for mental representations that are formed:*** A. Bottom-up (by visual presentation). To do this, we will analyze the movement path that the hands and eyes take when acquiring a visual target that follows an instruction to Remember or Forget.*** B. Top-down (by activation of a conceptual association). To do this, we will capitalize on principles of embodied cognition to reveal changes in spatial associations following instructions to Remember and Forget.******2. Characterize changes that occur to the availability of attention over time, rather than in space, following instructions to Remember and Forget.******3. Explore whether intentions to Forget make participants feel more negative about to-be-forgotten items and, if so, whether these evaluations persist long enough to alter subsequent thinking and decision-making.******III. NOVELTY AND SIGNIFICANCE****Central to this research are two problems that are fundamental to all cognitive systems – those of selection and representation. Using the memory system as a model cognitive system, we will offer unique insights into how selection for long-term memory is achieved, the level(s) of representation upon which this selection operates, and the consequences of this selection for emotional evaluations. In so doing, our research will generate new knowledge about how memory, attention, motor, and emotion systems interact in normal human cognition to achieve and reflect control over the contents of long-term memory.***<<