Internal and external intentional forgetting: Empirical studies and prototypical realization of an assistance system for the forgetting of digital information

工业和管理领域日益增长的数字化导致了大量数据的长期存储。然而，大量潜在的不相关的数字对象会阻碍员工的高效工作和决策，并对组织绩效产生负面影响。人类的遗忘允许忽略不相关的信息和它的长期衰退。然而，数字世界还没有利用这些有效的机制。在拟议的心理学和计算机科学跨学科项目中，主要目标是设计一个辅助系统（Dare2Del），以支持员工更有效地管理数字内容。联合应用场景是工业生产中的管理任务和规划工程师的支持。通过上下文敏感的隐藏和永久删除数字对象，员工应该忘记不相关的信息，从而帮助他们集中注意力，避免干扰，提高决策绩效。需要了解工作中的情境需求有助于或阻碍有意遗忘（内部）记忆内容或（外部）数字对象。这个问题将在与行政人员的经验抽样研究中加以解决。此外，该研究还调查了有意遗忘的能力在多大程度上有助于抑制无关的想法，并在日常工作中忽略无关的数字对象。在一项实验中，研究人员调查了隐藏不相关信息是否真的有助于忘记不相关的数字对象，并对工作表现和认知负荷产生积极影响。Dare2Del的概念是基于逻辑表示的基于知识的系统，并结合了不同的推理和学习机制。隐藏和删除的方法相同。Dare2Del是作为一种通用方法实现的。交换特定领域的知识模块可以方便地适应不同的应用环境（管理文档或工业生产中的管理或质量特性）。第一个资助期的重点是在工作环境中理解和形式化人类遗忘，并考虑信息系统如何检测数字对象的相关性。在第二个应用阶段，将针对特定的应用领域对Dare2Del进行实例化和评估。

The increasing digitalization in industry and administration results in long-term storage of ever larger amounts of data. However, large amounts of potentially irrelevant digital objects can hinder efficient work and decisions of individual employees, and negatively affect organizational performance. Human forgetting allows for ignoring irrelevant information and its long-term decay. However, the digital world does not yet exploit these effective mechanisms. In the proposed interdisciplinary project of psychology and computer science, the main goal is to design an assistance system (Dare2Del) which supports employees to manage digital content more effectively. Joint application scenarios are administrative tasks and the support of planning engineers in industrial production. By context-sensitive hiding and permanent deletion of digital objects employees should forget irrelevant information, which, in turn, helps them to focus their attention, avoid interference and improve their decision making performance. Knowledge is needed about which situational demands at work help or hinder intentional forgetting of (internal) memory content or (external) digital objects. This question will be addressed in an experience sampling study with administrative staff. In addition, it is investigated to what extent the ability to intentionally forget helps to suppress irrelevant thoughts, and to ignore irrelevant digital objects in daily work. In an experiment, it is investigated whether hiding irrelevant information actually supports forgetting of irrelevant digital objects, with positive consequences for work performance and cognitive load. Dare2Del is conceptualized as a knowledge-based system based on logical representations, and incorporating different inference and learning mechanisms. The same methods are applied for hiding and deleting. Dare2Del is realized as a generic approach. Exchanging the domain specific knowledge module allows easy adaptation to different application contexts (management of documents in administration or management or quality features in industrial production). The focus in the first funding period is the understanding and formalization of human forgetting in the context of work and it is considered how an information system can detect relevance of digital objects. In the second application period Dare2Del is to be instantiated and evaluated for specific areas of application.