Forgetting emotional material in working memory

Forgetting emotional material in working memory

Proactive interference (PI) is the tendency for information learned earlier to interfere with more recently learned information. In the present study, we induced PI by presenting items from the same category over several trials. This results in a build-up of PI and reduces the discriminability of the items in each subsequent trial. We introduced emotional (e.g. disgust) and neutral (e.g. furnit...

Remembering the good, forgetting the bad: intentional forgetting of emotional material in depression.

The authors examined intentional forgetting of negative material in depression. Participants were instructed to not think about emotional nouns that they had learned to associate with a neutral cue word. The authors provided participants with multiple occasions to suppress the unwanted words. Overall, depressed participants successfully forgot negative words. Moreover, the authors obtained a cl...

Directed forgetting of emotional material – cognitive and neural mechanisms

Directed forgetting and directed remembering in visual working memory.

A defining characteristic of visual working memory is its limited capacity. This means that it is crucial to maintain only the most relevant information in visual working memory. However, empirical research is mixed as to whether it is possible to selectively maintain a subset of the information previously encoded into visual working memory. Here we examined the ability of participants to use c...

Interference: unique source of forgetting in working memory?

In their opinion article, Lewandowsky, Oberauer and Brown [1] make a strong case against time-based accounts of forgetting in short-term andworkingmemory.We argue, however, that the interference-based account they favor is underspecified, that the time-loss functions predicted by time-based models are misconstrued and that the contradictory findings issued from the time-based resource-sharing (...