Olvido inducido por la recuperación con experiencias emocionales positivas y negativas

Abstract

Recent research has shown that the act of remembering can prompt forgetting of related material. This phenomenon, known as retrieval-induced forgetting, emphasizes the memory's inhibitory processes in competitive situations. This experiment extends the retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm to positive and negative emotional experiences had by other people. In the study phase, to manipulate competition, participants were given experiences of two characters: positive of both, negative of both, positive of the practiced character and negative of the baseline character, or vice versa. In the practice phase they retrieved half of the experiences of one of the characters using cued recall. In the final phase they tried to recall the experiences of both characters. The results showed facilitation for practiced experiences and inhibition for non-practiced experiences when compared to the baseline, but only when the characters' experiences were of the same nature. Inhibition was eliminated when their experiences were of a different nature. Competition between experiences and integration processes during the study phase may explain these effects