Abstract
Intrusive memories are a common feature of many psychopathologies, and suppression-induced forgetting of unwanted memories appears as a critical ability to preserve mental health. In recent years, biological and cognitive studies converged in revealing that forgetting is due to active processes. Recent neurobiological studies provide evidence on the active role of main neurotransmitter systems in forgetting, suggesting that the brain actively works to suppress retrieval of unwanted memories. On the cognitive side, there is evidence that voluntary and involuntary processes (here termed “intentional” and “incidental” forgetting, respectively) contribute to active forgetting. In intentional forgetting, an inhibitory control mechanism suppresses awareness of unwanted memories at encoding or retrieval. In incidental forgetting, retrieval practice of some memories involuntarily suppresses the retrieval of other related memories. In this review we describe recent findings on deficits in active forgetting observed in psychopathologies, like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Moreover, we report studies in which the role of neurotransmitter systems, known to be involved in the pathogenesis of mental disorders, has been investigated in active forgetting paradigms. The possibility that biological and cognitive mechanisms of active forgetting could be considered as hallmarks of the early onset of psychopathologies is also discussed.
Highlights
There is increasing empirical research suggesting that intrusive memories are a common feature of many mental disorders [1,2,3,4,5,6]
On the contrary, impaired suppressioninduced forgetting has been associated with worse mental health and has been found in individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder [12], rumination [13,14], anxiety [15,16], and depression [17,18,19,20]
Networks are involved in behavioral and cognitive inhibition; (ii) active forgetting is due to the inhibitory control exerted by prefrontal cortex (PFC) on subcortical structures responsible for memory formation; and (iii) different neurotransmitter systems modulate the function of PFC networks responsible for inhibitory control
Summary
There is increasing empirical research suggesting that intrusive memories are a common feature of many mental disorders [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for this phenomenon, most of them can be grouped into the broad category of inhibition-based forgetting theories [34] According to this perspective, attempts to retrieve practiced exemplars from memory cause associated items to become activated. Anderson et al (2004) found that “no-think” trials were accompanied by increased activation of bilateral dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, as well as by reduced activity bilaterally in the hippocampus Both incidental and intentional forgetting are involved in emotional memory control [10,44,45], and deficits in regulating such memories are known to play a key role in the onset of psychopathological disorders [45,46]. We review literature on the role of the main neurotransmitter and hormone systems in forgetting
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