Psychology Commons^™

Intentional Forgetting Benefits From Thought Substitution, Paula T. Hertel, G. Calcaterra

Psychology Faculty Research

This study provides both experimental and correlational evidence that forgetting in the think/no-think paradigm (Anderson & Green, 2001) is sensitive to the substitution of thoughts about new events forthoughts that are to be suppressed. All the participants learned a list of adjective-noun pairs. Then the adjectives were presented as cues for recalling half of the nouns and as cues for suppressing the other half, 0, 2, or 12 times. Aided participants were provided with substitute nouns, to use during suppression. On a final test that requested recall of all initially learned nouns, aided participants showed evidence of below-baseline forgetting of …