Her Voice Lingers on and Her Memory Is Strategic: Effects of Gender on Directed Forgetting

Hwajin Yang,Giho Park,Sujin Yang,Alexandre Hiroaki Kihara

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064030

Abstract

The literature on directed forgetting has employed exclusively visual words. Thus, the potentially interesting aspects of a spoken utterance, which include not only vocal cues (e.g., prosody) but also the speaker and the listener, have been neglected. This study demonstrates that prosody alone does not influence directed-forgetting effects, while the sex of the speaker and the listener significantly modulate directed-forgetting effects for spoken utterances. Specifically, forgetting costs were attenuated for female-spoken items compared to male-spoken items, and forgetting benefits were eliminated among female listeners but not among male listeners. These results suggest that information conveyed in a female voice draws attention to its distinct perceptual attributes, thus interfering with retention of the semantic meaning, while female listeners' superior capacity for processing the surface features of spoken utterances may predispose them to spontaneously employ adaptive strategies to retain content information despite distraction by perceptual features. Our findings underscore the importance of sex differences when processing spoken messages in directed forgetting.

Highlights

A key characteristic of adaptive memory processing is forgetting information that is no longer needed
The ‘‘remember’’ group is instructed to remember both List 1 and List 2, but the ‘‘forget’’ group is told to forget List 1 and to retain only List 2. These groups are asked to recall as many words as possible from both lists. Research using this paradigm has typically shown two robust effects: (1) forgetting costs, which refer to the impaired recall of List 1 in the forget group relative to the remember group, and (2) forgetting benefits, which refer to the enhanced recall of List 2 in the forget group relative to the remember group
Consistent with the literature, significant directed-forgetting effects were captured by the LIST x CUE interaction, F(1, 161) = 33.3, p,.001, g2 =

Summary

Introduction

A key characteristic of adaptive memory processing is forgetting information that is no longer needed. Directed (or intentional) forgetting refers to the purposeful loss of information that has been successfully encoded but designated as unimportant. Studies of this phenomenon have widely used a procedure in which participants are presented with two lists of words (List 1, List 2) and instructed to either remember or forget those lists (for a review, see [2]). These groups are asked to recall as many words as possible from both lists Research using this paradigm has typically shown two robust effects: (1) forgetting costs, which refer to the impaired recall of List 1 in the forget group relative to the remember group, and (2) forgetting benefits, which refer to the enhanced recall of List 2 in the forget group relative to the remember group

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Conclusion