Intentional forgetting in humans: memory selection at encoding

《忘不了的女人》是吉尔·普莱斯的回忆录，她的记忆是如此全面，以至于无法区分她生活中“最戏剧性或最重要的事件”和“完全平庸的日常事物”。她记得1979年10月19日午餐时喝的汤，就像她记得挑战者号航天飞机爆炸一样生动。虽然我们中的许多人可能会羡慕她明显非凡的记忆力，但普莱斯将自己的状况描述为一种负担。她的故事强调了遗忘对正常记忆功能的重要性。 虽然我们经常将遗忘与记忆中不必要的，有时令人沮丧的失误联系起来，但当有意进行时，遗忘通过允许我们选择性地将相关而不是不相关的项目长期存储在记忆中来为记忆服务。在我之前的NSERC资助期间，我和我的学生们发现，在编码时制定一个记忆意图会引发注意力从将要被遗忘和将要被记住的信息中的不同撤回。在这项申请中，我们建议使用认知行为方法与健康的人类志愿者：1）调查这种注意力撤回对后续信息处理的后果; 2）确定记忆表征的性质，这种记忆表征是为逃避编码时的初始选择而形成的。以及，3）发现与积极和中性刺激相比，消极刺激的有意遗忘较差是否是由于情绪效价和/或唤醒对注意力的影响。 通过关注编码（而不是提取）的选择，我们的研究提供了独特的视角，既注意力在制定记忆意图中的作用，又对成功和不成功的记忆选择的后果。在这样做的过程中，我们的工作有助于理解在正常人类记忆中选择和表征待遗忘和待记住信息的基本认知过程。

"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.