Testing theories of forgetting: The effect of memory suppression strategies on associative memory
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Associative memory is the ability to form an association between two items and later recall one of the associates given the other. The strength of the association is a major contributor to successful recall. However, the way in which association strengths are strengthened and weakened is not fully understood. We were interested in exploring how attempts of suppression, where one intentionally tries to forget an association, affect the strength of associations. In an attempt to gain understanding of how associations can be influenced by suppression, we ran 2 experiments. Experiment 1 served as a replication of a classic memory suppression study, where we attempted to elicit a suppression effect following repeated intentional attempts at suppressing associations. Our results from Experiment 1 were consistent with previous findings, where cued retrieval performance on word pairs was significantly impaired after multiple attempts at suppressing the associations between pairs. The magnitude of impairment for the suppressed associations was found to be independent of the specific suppression instructions. Following the results from Experiment 1, we conducted an experiment to better understand how the suppression attempts were mechanistically affecting the association strengths of the targeted word pairs. We found that when subjects were instructed to directly suppress an association, they were significantly better at learning new associations with the suppressed associate as compared to subjects who were instructed to divert their thoughts during suppression attempts. Overall, our results suggest that directly suppressing an association weakens the strength of the association, thus reducing the amount of impairment present when new associations sharing one of the associates are being formed and retrieved.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2018 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Tippett, Daylon |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Jiang, Jiefeng |
| Primary advisor | Wagner, Anthony |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Symbolic Systems Program |
Subjects
| Subject | Symbolic Systems |
|---|---|
| Subject | Stanford University |
| Subject | Memory |
| Subject | Suppression |
| Subject | Psychology |
| Subject | Associations |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Tippett, D. A., Jiang, J., & Wagner, A. D. (2018). Testing theories of forgetting: The effect of memory suppression strategies on associative memory. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/kd398nz5661
Collection
Undergraduate Honors Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University
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- Contact
- daylon@stanford.edu
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