Consciousness and Cognition 59 (2018) 26–31

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Consciousness and Cognition

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog

Motivated forgetting reduces veridical memories but slightly

T
increases false memories in both young and healthy older people
⁎
Alfonso Pitarquea, , Encarnación Satorresb, Joaquín Escuderoc, Salvador Algarabela,
Omar Bekkersd, Juan C. Meléndezb
a
Dept. Methodology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia, Av. Blasco Ibanez 21, 46010 Valencia, Spain
b
Dept. Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia, Av. Blasco Ibanez 21, 46010 Valencia, Spain
c
Dept. Neurology, General Hospital, Av. Tres Cruces 2, 46014 Valencia, Spain
d
Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia, Av. Blasco Ibanez 21, 46010 Valencia, Spain

AR TI CLE I NF O AB S T R A CT

Keywords: The aim of the current study is to examine the effects of motivated forgetting and aging on true
Directed forgetting and false memory. Sixty young and 54 healthy older adults were instructed to study two lists of
Recall 18 words each. Each list was composed of three sets of six words associated with three non-
Inhibition presented critical words. After studying list 1, half of the participants received the instruction to
Aging
forget List 1, whereas the other half received the instruction to remember List 1. Next, all the
False memories
subjects studied list 2; finally, they were asked to remember the words studied in both lists. The
results showed that when participants intended to forget the studied List 1, they were less likely
to recall the studied words, but more likely to intrude the critical words. That is, we can in-
tentionally forget something but this can also entail the intrusion of some related false memories.

1. Introduction

At certain times, we would all like to intentionally forget some memories, especially those that are disagreeable to us (e.g., an
accident, an aggression, an illness, etc.). Experimental research has shown that suppressing the awareness of a memory can be
achieved through inhibitory control processes engaged either during memory encoding (to disrupt the consolidation of that memory)
or retrieval (to disrupt the retrieval of a consolidated memory from our conscious awareness; Anderson & Hanslmayr, 2014). In-
hibitory control at encoding has mainly been investigated with two directed forgetting paradigms: (a) In the item-method directed
forgetting procedure, participants study items one at a time, and each item is followed by a forget (F) or remember (R) instruction.
Later, memory for all items is tested, resulting in worse recall for F items than for R items. (b) In the list-method directed forgetting
procedure, participants study two lists of items. The first list is followed either by the instruction to forget (F) or by the instruction to
remember (R, in a between-subjects comparison), whereas the second list is followed by the instruction R to all participants. Later,
memory of the items from the two lists is tested. The directed-forgetting effect refers to the fact that forget-cue participants typically
show impaired List 1 recall compared to remember-cue participants, as well as improved List 2 recall, known as the costs and the
benefits of directed forgetting, respectively (Bjork, 1972; MacLeod, 1998). Inhibitory control at retrieval is often studied with the
think/no-think (TNT) paradigm: first, participants study cue–target pairs and are trained to recall the second item in each pair
whenever they encounter the first item. Then participants begin the TNT phase, in which they are asked to exert control over

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: pitarque@uv.es (A. Pitarque), Encarna.Satorres@uv.es (E. Satorres), escudero_joa@gva.es (J. Escudero),
Salvador.Algarabel@uv.es (S. Algarabel), obeklo@alumni.uv.es (O. Bekkers), Juan.C.Melendez@uv.es (J.C. Meléndez).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.01.004
Received 26 September 2017; Received in revised form 28 November 2017; Accepted 20 January 2018
1053-8100/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A. Pitarque et al. Consciousness and Cognition 59 (2018) 26–31

retrieval. On each trial, reminders from the pairs appear in two different colors: when the reminder appears in one color, participants
are supposed to recall the response, whereas for the other color reminders, participants are asked to avoid retrieving the response,
thus keeping it from entering their awareness. Memory performance is compared on no-think trials, think trials, and items they
studied but did not suppress or retrieve (baseline trials), with worse recall on no-think trials (Anderson & Green, 2001). These
experimental results have also been replicated with autobiographical materials (Barnier et al., 2007; Noreen & MacLeod, 2014). Some
authors think these results do not exclusively support an inhibitory explanation under executive control (e.g. Anderson & Hanslmayr,
2014; Noreen & MacLeod, 2015) because the forget instruction may also induce a deliberate change in participants’ internal context
(also under their executive control). This change then impairs later recall of the original list due to a mismatch between the context at
encoding and the context at retrieval (Manning et al., 2016; Masicampo & Sahakyan, 2014).
The intentional suppression of veridical memories seems to grow more difficult as we age (Anderson, Reinholz, Kuhl, & Mayr,
2011; Sahakyan, Delaney, & Goodmon, 2008; Zacks, Radvansky, & Hasher, 1996; Titz & Verhaeghen, 2010, for a review), which
would support the importance of the executive control in the explanation of this effect, given that older people have been shown to
have deficits in inhibitory abilities (Hasher & Zacks, 1988) and in binding events to their context (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008).
However Aslan, Bäuml, and Pastötter (2007), Sego, Golding, and Gottlob (2006) and Zellner and Bäuml (2006) obtained the same
directed forgetting effect in young and older people, which seems to give less relevance to the role played by executive control in the
explanation of motivated forgetting. But in a recent meta-analysis Titz and Verhaeghen (2010) have shown that a cue to forget is
more effective in younger (d = 1.17) than in older adults (d = 0.81), which would indicate that there is an executive deficit in elderly
people.
The DRM experimental paradigm (after Deese-Roediger-McDermott; Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) made it possible
to demonstrate that the study of semantically related words (e.g., sit, desk) produces the false recall of some unstudied critical words
(e.g., chair) related semantically to them, generically known as false memories. This robust false memory effect has been addressed in
a large body of literature (Gallo, 2010, for a review). Through the use of this paradigm, false memories have been shown to increase
with age (Devitt & Schacter, 2016, for a review). Two theoretical models have mainly been used to explain this effect in the literature.
On the one hand, the fuzzy-trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) emphasizes that old people, due to their limited capacity to
recollect item-specific or contextual information, mainly tend to base their retrieval judgments on their gist memory (or the general
theme of the information underlying the stimuli studied), giving rise to an increase in both their true and false memories. On the
other hand, the activation-monitoring theory (Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001) establishes that, during study, both
studied items and items semantically related to them are activated (due to spreading activation from the former to the latter). At the
time of retrieval, the subject carries out a conscious monitoring process to distinguish between studied and non-studied items. Given
that non-studied lure items can be highly activated, source-monitoring errors can occur (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993),
leading to false memories. False memories can be reduced via a conscious process of recollection rejection, where lures are rejected
on the grounds that they do not contain the expected item-specific information (Brainerd, Reyna, Wright, & Mojardin, 2003). That is,
whereas activation enhances false memories, monitoring reduces them (Gallo, 2010). Many studies have found support for the correct
use of this recollection-based monitoring strategy in young people, but less in healthy older people or people with cognitive im-
pairment, due to their aforementioned contextual or binding deficits (Gallo, Sullivan, Daffner, Schacter, & Budson, 2004; Pitarque
et al., 2016).
Various studies have analyzed motivated forgetting of false memories using the DRM paradigm, with varying results and always
in young adult participants. Some studies have shown that directed forgetting reduces true recall, but it does not affect false recall
(Knott, Howe, Wimmer, & Dewhurst, 2011, exp. 1; Lee, 2008, using a list-method forgetting procedure; Seamon, Luo, Shulman,
Toner, & Caglar, 2002), leading to the interpretation that controlled inhibition does not seem to affect false memories. Other studies
have shown reduced false recall with directed forgetting instructions (Lee, 2008, using an item-method forgetting procedure; Marche,
Brainerd, Lane, & Loehr, 2005), reaching the conclusion that the instruction “forget” is also effective in inhibiting critical words
because they form part of the same gist memory as the studied words. Finally, another study showed that directed forgetting in-
structions increase false recall (Kimball & Bjork, 2002), with the explanation being that impairing access to List 1 also impairs
participants’ ability to use episodically distinctive information to determine that the semantically activated critical items were not on
the list. This interpretation is consistent with predictions made both by the fuzzy-trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) and the
activation-monitoring theory (Roediger et al., 2001).
Overall, the different interpretations of these discordant results depend on the relative weight assigned to either the automatic
activation processes or the monitoring and inhibition processes under executive control (Gallo, 2010). As far as we know, no study
has analyzed the role of motivated forgetting of false memories in healthy older people. We think it is relevant to compare young and
healthy older people because it will allow us to analyze the role played by monitoring processes in the inhibition of both true recall
and false recall, given that older people have been shown to have significant deficits in executive control (Hasher & Zacks, 1988). For
example, if the young people were capable of inhibiting both veridical and false memories but the older people were not, this would
support the more important role of controlled inhibition, whereas the lack of differences between the two samples would imply a
greater role of the automatic activation processes.
Another reason for these inconsistent results might be related to the DRM paradigm’s limited sensitivity in capturing the for-
getting of false memories because each study list is usually associated with only one critical word, and so each participant contributes
only one observation to the critical-item analysis (e.g. Kimball & Bjork, 2002; Knott et al., 2011; Lee, 2008; Seamon et al., 2002). In
other words, a lack of differences between the forget and remember instructions on false memories (e.g. Lee, 2008; Marche et al.,
2005) will always raise doubts about whether this null result occurs because the forget instruction is not effective in inhibiting the
critical words, or because our procedure has low sensitivity due to the small number of critical words. In an attempt to solve this

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problem, some studies have included some type of variation on the standard DRM procedure to increase the number of critical words
per study list. For example Beato and Díez (2011) recently developed a normative database of 60 six-word lists (e.g., bridal, new-
lyweds, bond, commitment, couple, to marry), each associated with three critical words (e.g., love, wedding, marriage). In our opinion,
these normative databases would contribute greater sensitivity to the directed forgetting procedure in order to analyze whether the
“forget” instruction is effective in reducing false memories, as there would be three critical words per study list (and not only one, as
in most studies).
In sum, given the disparity in the experimental results, mentioned above, and the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, no study
has analyzed the role of intentional forgetting on false memories in healthy older people, we propose an experiment (based on the
list-method directed forgetting procedure and using the normative database of Beato & Díez, 2011) that analyzes whether directed
forgetting instructions are effective in veridical recall of studied words and false recall of critical lures, and their relationship with
healthy aging, comparing a sample of young people and a sample of healthy older adults. This comparison will allow us to analyze the
role played by the automatic activation processes and those under executive control in the directed forgetting of true and false
memories.

2. Materials and method

2.1. Participants

The sample of young adults was composed of 60 students (49 women, 11 men) in the Psychology degree program at the University
of Valencia, with ages between 18 and 28 years old (M = 20.15, SE = 0.39). The sample of older people was composed of 54 people
(32 women, 22 men), with ages between 60 and 92 years old (M = 71.19, SE = 0.99), recruited from several courses for elderly
people held in the city of Valencia. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the forget list 1 condition, and the other half
were assigned to the remember list 1 condition. All the participants gave their informed consent to freely participate, and they
reported being in good physical and mental health, with no known memory impairments. In this regard, the mean for the older
people on the Mini-Mental State Examination (Folstein, Folstein, & McHugh, 1975) was 28.89 (SE = 0.18, range 26–30), revealing no
memory impairment.

2.2. Materials

We selected two sets (A and B) of 6 lists of words from the Beato and Díez (2011); each list consisted of six study words associated
with three critical words. These two sets of 6 lists were matched on backward associative strength (mean set A = 2.29, SD = 0.44;
mean set B = 2.59, SD = 0.44), percentage of true recognition (mean set A = 76.30, SD = 8.72; mean set B = 68.87, SD = 5.95) and
false recognition (mean set A = 46.01, SD = 11.33; mean set B = 43.88, SD = 6.18). Sets A and B were counter-balanced across
subjects. In later analyses of our results, both sets produced statistically similar results on true and false recall.

2.3. Procedure

Our procedure followed the instructions of a classical list-method directed forgetting procedure (Anderson & Hanslmayr, 2014).
All of the participants were tested individually at a computer, and they began by studying a list of 18 words presented sequentially for
3 s each, with an inter-stimulus period of 1 s. These 18 words corresponded to 3 (chosen randomly) of the 6 lists from set A or set B,
and they were presented in the same order in which they appear in the Beato and Díez (2011), from the strongest associate of the
critical items to the weakest. Thus, List 1 involved a total of 18 words to be studied, associated with 9 critical words. After the first
phase of the study, half of the participants (chosen randomly) received the instruction to forget these 18 studied words (they were
told that this had been a trial and that should forget the studied words and focus on studying the next list; forget condition). The other
half of the participants were simply told that they were going to study a second study list next (remember condition). After a minute
break, all of the subjects received a second study list of 18 other words, corresponding to the other 3 lists from set A or B that were not
used in List 1, and associated with 9 other critical words. In other words, on the two study tasks, each participant studied the 6 lists
from set A or Set B (sets A and B were counter-balanced across subjects). Finally, and after another minute break, the participants
were asked to write all the words they remembered from both study lists, trying to be as precise as possible in their recall. No time
limit was placed on the free recall (Seamon et al., 2002). When the task was over, the participants assigned to the “forget” condition
were told why they had been misled (by asking them to forget list 1, and then asking them to remember it).

3. Results

Table 1 shows the overall results of our experiment.

3.1. True recall

True recall was estimated based on the proportion of correctly recalled words from each of the two lists studied (18 words per
list). A mixed ANOVA with 2 groups (young vs older people; between subjects) × 2 instructions (forget vs remember List 1; between
subjects) × 2 lists (List 1 vs List 2; within subjects) on proportions of hits showed the main effect of the group factor to be significant

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Table 1
Mean proportions (and SE) of hits (true recall) and critical words elicited (false recall) as a function of age group and instruction (forget vs remember List 1).

Young Older people

Forget (n = 30) Remember (n = 30) Forget (n = 27) Remember (n = 27)

True recall List 1 0.39 (0.03) 0.45 (0.03) 0.24 (0.03) 0.33 (0.03)
List 2 0.51 (0.03) 0.42 (0.03) 0.29 (0.03) 0.25 (0.03)

False recall List 1 0.12 (0.02) 0.09 (0.02) 0.14 (0.02) 0.07 (0.02)
List 2 0.11 (0.02) 0.10 (0.02) 0.15 (0.02) 0.15 (0.02)

(F(1, 110) = 48.00, p < .001, η2p = 0.30), revealing that young people had better recall (M = 0.44) than older people (M = 0.28), as
is commonly found in the literature (Hasher & Zacks, 1988). The instructions X lists interaction was also significant (F(1,
110) = 10.89, p = 001, η2p = 0.09). Post-hoc Bonferroni comparisons on this significant interaction showed that the instruction
“forget List 1” was effective in reducing the hit rate (M = 0.32), compared to the instruction “remember List 2” (M = 0.41; t
(56) = 2.73, p = .009), thus showing the benefits of directed forgetting (Bjork, 1972; MacLeod, 1998). In the same way, the difference
between the instructions “forget List 1” (M = 0.32) and “remember List 1” (M = 0.39) was also significant (t(1 1 2) = 2.14,
p = .035), showing the costs of directed forgetting (Bjork, 1972; MacLeod, 1998). The remaining main effects and interactions of the
ANOVA were not significant. Overall, these results clearly show that manipulation of the ‘‘remember’’ vs. ‘‘forget’’ instruction was
effective, showing a significant directed forgetting effect in both young and older people (Titz & Verhaeghen, 2010), which validates
our experimental procedure.

3.2. False recall

False recall was estimated based on the proportion of critical words elicited by each subject on each of the two lists studied (9
words per list). A mixed ANOVA with 2 groups × 2 instructions × 2 lists on proportions of false memories revealed that only the
main effect of the instructions factor was significant (F(1, 110) = 3.98, p = .049, η2p = 0.04), showing that the forget instruction gave
rise to more false memories (M = 0.13) than the remember instruction (M = 0.10). The remaining main effects and interactions of
the ANOVA were not significant. These results would indicate that directed forgetting instructions slightly but significantly increase
false memories in both young (as in Bjork & Bjork, 2003; Kimball & Bjork, 2002) and older people, with theoretical and practical
implications that we will discuss below.

3.3. Intrusions

Intrusions are words that are incorrectly remembered by the subjects (because they were not studied) and were not the critical
words on the studied lists from the Beato and Díez (2011). Given that the mean proportion of intrusions was always below 0.05, and
that the mixed ANOVA on them yielded non-significant results (both for the main effects and for the interactions), the intrusions have
not been included in Table 1 or considered in the discussion.

4. Discussion

Our experiment mainly showed that when participants intended to forget a studied list, they were less likely to recall the studied
items, but more likely to intrude the critical items, than when they intended to remember the list (as in Bjork & Bjork, 2003; Kimball
& Bjork, 2002). This pattern of results is similar in both young and older people, although the latter start from a lower basal level of
true recall than young people, due to their well-known deficits both in inhibitory abilities (Hasher & Zacks, 1988) and episodic
binding (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008).
With regard to forgetting true memories, our results disagree with those found by Anderson et al. (2011), Sahakyan et al. (2008)
or Zacks et al. (1996) but coincide with the results found by Aslan et al. (2007), Sego et al. (2006) or Zellner and Bäuml (2006), who
also obtained significant directed forgetting in older people, although this effect is smaller than that found in young people (as in Titz
& Verhaeghen, 2010). Thus our results seem to support an explanation of the directed forgetting effect based on the capacity of the
executive control to inhibit the items to forget on list 1 (e.g.Anderson & Hanslmayr, 2014; Noreen & MacLeod, 2015). Logically,
directed forgetting instructions have less effect on older people than on young people, given the well-known attentional limitations of
older people (Hasher & Zacks, 1988).
With regard to forgetting false memories, the fact that the “forget” instruction tends to slightly increase the proportion of un-
studied critical words, seem to support the idea that a second mechanism (of an automatic activation nature) also has to be con-
sidered (as proposed, e.g., in the activation-monitoring theory; Roediger et al., 2001). These two mechanisms, automatic activation and
inhibition/monitoring under executive control, would allow us to explain the overall results obtained in our experiment. Thus, in our
experiment, the activation would be propagated from the words studied toward the critical words, making them more accessible to
later recall. The participants who received the instruction to “remember list 1” could probably use the contextual information
associated with the studied words, applying a conscious monitoring mechanism (of a recall-to-reject nature, for example) to reduce

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the false memory of activated critical words. However, the participants who received the instruction to “forget list 1” could not use
this contextual information associated with the studied words (because the forget instruction was effective in its inhibition).
Therefore, they could not as effectively apply the conscious monitoring process to reduce the errors produced by the activation of the
critical words (Kimball & Bjork, 2002), producing an intrusion effect of the false memories. However the fuzzy-trace or gist theory
(Reyna & Brainerd, 1995) cannot explain our results because it would predict an increase in false memories in older people compared
to young people (at least in the remember condition) since to overcome their deficit in item-specific information they should trust
more in their gist memory (Kensinger & Schacter, 1999).
Bäuml and Samenieh (2010) recently found similar results when demonstrating that selective memory retrieval can either impair
or improve related memories. These authors conducted a list-method directed forgetting experiment in which List 1 consisted of 4
target (to-be-remembered) items and 12 non-target items. Testing differed in terms of whether the instructions asked the participants
to recall 0, 4, 8, or 12 of the non-targets before they recalled the targets from List 1. Recall of to-be-remembered targets decreased
linearly, and recall of to-be-forgotten targets increased linearly, as more and more of the non-targets were previously retrieved,
indicating that prior retrieval of other memories can impair or improve recall of target memories. As Bäuml and Samenieh (2010)
pointed out, when operating on to-be-remembered memories, selective retrieval induces inhibition of related memories (or retrieval-
induced forgetting; Anderson, 2003). By contrast, when operating on to-be-forgotten memories, selective retrieval spreads activation to
other related memories, facilitating their recollection. Our results are consistent with this idea.
However we must be cautious in generalizing our results as they may depend on the specific manipulation conditions we have
used. For example, it would be interesting to analyze if our results are replicated using an item-method procedure or a recognition
test (see Titz & Verhaeghen, 2010). Similarly, it would be necessary to include some neuropsychological measures of participants
(and specifically their working memory capacity) to rule out complementary explanations. Thus further research is needed along
these lines.
In general terms, our results support the idea that there are two ways to retrieve knowledge from human memory, as the dual-
process theories propose (Koen & Yonelinas, 2014; Roediger et al., 2001): an implicit one, based on the automatic activation from the
studied items to the related items (familiarity), and an explicit one, under executive control, based on the conscious recollection of
episodic traces from memory and the (correct or incorrect) use of inferential monitoring strategies. False memories depend on the
interrelationship between the two processes: whereas activation enhances false memories, monitoring reduces them (Gallo, 2010).
Familiarity and recollection seem to be located in distinct neuroanatomic structures within the temporal medial lobe: evidence from
neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and neurophysiological studies of humans and animals seems to indicate that activity in the
hippocampus is associated with recollection, whereas activity in the perirhinal cortex is related to familiarity (Eichenbaum,
Yonelinas, & Ranganath, 2007).
Finally, our results about the effects of directed forgetting on true and false memories may be analogized to real-world phe-
nomena, with implications e.g. for eyewitness memory. For example, according to our results (and Kimball & Bjork, 2002), the
victim’s own self-motivated desire to forget an abuse (a car accident or another type of eyewitness crime) could involve forgetting
some veridical recalls about this abuse, but as a counterpart, it could also entail the intrusion of some incorrect, but plausible, recalls
related to it. Forgetting certain true memories about the abuse could lead e.g. to the exoneration of an accused perpetrator, whereas
remembering some false details could mean that an innocent person would be legally incriminated. Similarly, according to our
results, a person who wants to lose weight and self-imposes the instruction “do not eat” (i.e., “forget food”) will probably end up
having incorrect intrusive thoughts related to food (which could lead, for example, to developing eating pathologies). Likewise, a
person who wants to forget his/her ex-husband/wife would probably end up having incorrect but plausible intrusive thoughts related
to him/her. In other words, our results show a certain relationship with the famous experiments by Wegner on thought suppression
(the well-known effect of “do not think about a white bear”; Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000), or even with the psychoanalytic concept of
repression (Conway, 2001), opening the doors to new and promising lines of research.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by grant PSI2016-77405-R of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (AEI/FEDER,
UE).

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