Purposeful memory: Influences on how we remember and forget

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We are increasingly exposed to larger amounts of information than we could possibly be expected to remember. How can we know, when we first encounter information, whether we will remember it later-or even whether we should? The long-term goal of my proposed research program is to gain a greater understanding of the extent to which people have control over and awareness of their ability to remember and forget purposefully. In the examination of memory control processes, my research program will focus on how people try to not learn information that is unimportant: to forget. In the directed forgetting paradigm, participants study information and are cued to remember some portions of that information but to forget other portions, with memory tests generally showing better performance for the to-be-remembered portion. In everyday life, we have substantial choice in whether to attend to and encode or to disregard and forget the information that we encounter. Yet the influence of choice in our ability to intentionally forget information has not been studied. Studies have shown that when individuals choose what they would like to study, honouring these choices leads to better memory performance than does dishonouring these choices. In my proposed studies, learners choose items to remember or to forget prior to a study phase. During study, some of their choices will be honoured, and some will be dishonoured. The goal is to examine how choosing information affects intentional forgetting. Relatedly, we use source information to decide how important it is to remember something. I will further explore how we use source reliability to change our strategies for remembering or forgetting information. My research will also examine how emotion influences memory awareness and control. People believe and predict that emotional information (e.g., recounting a crime or celebration) will be remembered better than neutral information, but whether it is actually remembered better depends on the interaction of a number of different factors, including the type of test, the type of stimuli (e.g., words vs. pictures) and the specific study list context. Can learners appreciate the factors that influence their memory for emotional content in order to make accurate memory predictions? The goal is to examine the extent to which the emotional content of material and overall study context influence our ability to accurately predict memory performance, and to explore how we use these predictions to control study processes in service of optimizing memory. The proposed continuation of my research program will contribute to our understanding of how we are able to control encoding and how both monitoring and control are influenced by emotion. Understanding when monitoring is precise and when we can successfully control encoding are essential to understanding the purposeful use of memory. This research will ultimately contribute to our conception of memory in general.