Controlling the contents of memory: Intentional forgetting at encoding

> >我* * *。“人们总是说记住事情有多难——把钥匙放在哪里了，或者一个熟人的名字——但从来没有人说过我们在遗忘上付出了多少努力。”- Stephen Carpenter******我的实验室确实讨论过这个。******我和我的学生们都对有意遗忘很着迷——人们会有意地选择一些东西作为长期记忆，而丢弃另一些东西。我们的研究首次证明，有意识地忘记不需要的信息比有意识地记住信息更容易。我们认为，这种努力与积极地将注意力从即将被遗忘的项目中撤出有关，这也损害了对附近其他项目的处理。我们已经确定了个体差异，这些差异使得一些人在故意遗忘方面比其他人更糟糕，同时也表明有意遗忘在各种情绪和中性刺激下表现出惊人的强劲。我们进一步揭示，当有意遗忘失败，对不需要的信息形成长期记忆时，产生的记忆痕迹与要记住的项目不同。******II。目标和方法****我们将继续在这个富有成果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故意遗忘。我们计划实现三个目标：******1。描述形成的心理表征对空间的注意变化：*** A.自下而上（通过视觉呈现）。为了做到这一点，我们将分析手和眼睛在获得一个遵循“记住或忘记”指令的视觉目标时的运动路径。*** B.自上而下（通过激活概念关联）。为了做到这一点，我们将利用具身认知的原理来揭示空间关联的变化，并遵循“记住和忘记”的指导。******2。按照“记住和忘记”的指示，描述注意力可用性随时间而非空间的变化。******探索遗忘的意图是否会使参与者对即将被遗忘的项目感到更消极，如果是这样，这些评估是否持续足够长的时间来改变随后的思考和决策。******新奇与意义****本研究的核心是两个对所有认知系统都至关重要的问题——选择和表征。使用记忆系统作为模型认知系统，我们将提供关于长期记忆的选择是如何实现的独特见解，这种选择操作的表征水平，以及这种选择对情绪评估的影响。通过这样做，我们的研究将产生关于记忆、注意力、运动和情感系统如何在正常的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.***<<