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A neural signature of contextually mediated intentional forgetting

Overview of attention for article published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, May 2016
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Title
A neural signature of contextually mediated intentional forgetting
Published in
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, May 2016
DOI 10.3758/s13423-016-1024-7
Pubmed ID
Authors

Jeremy R. Manning, Justin C. Hulbert, Jamal Williams, Luis Piloto, Lili Sahakyan, Kenneth A. Norman

Abstract

The mental context in which we experience an event plays a fundamental role in how we organize our memories of an event (e.g. in relation to other events) and, in turn, how we retrieve those memories later. Because we use contextual representations to retrieve information pertaining to our past, processes that alter our representations of context can enhance or diminish our capacity to retrieve particular memories. We designed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to test the hypothesis that people can intentionally forget previously experienced events by changing their mental representations of contextual information associated with those events. We had human participants study two lists of words, manipulating whether they were told to forget (or remember) the first list prior to studying the second list. We used pattern classifiers to track neural patterns that reflected contextual information associated with the first list and found that, consistent with the notion of contextual change, the activation of the first-list contextual representation was lower following a forget instruction than a remember instruction. Further, the magnitude of this neural signature of contextual change was negatively correlated with participants' abilities to later recall items from the first list.

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Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 103 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United Kingdom 2 2%
United States 1 <1%
Unknown 100 97%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 26 25%
Researcher 13 13%
Student > Master 12 12%
Professor 9 9%
Student > Bachelor 9 9%
Other 18 17%
Unknown 16 16%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Psychology 42 41%
Neuroscience 18 17%
Computer Science 5 5%
Unspecified 4 4%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 4 4%
Other 9 9%
Unknown 21 20%