Metamemory and Memory Discrepancies in Directed Forgetting of Emotional Information.

Dicle Çapan,Simay Ikier

doi:10.5964/ejop.2567

Abstract

Directed Forgetting (DF) studies show that it is possible to exert cognitive control to intentionally forget information. The aim of the present study was to investigate how aware individuals are of the control they have over what they remember and forget when the information is emotional. Participants were presented with positive, negative and neutral photographs, and each photograph was followed by either a Remember or a Forget instruction. Then, for each photograph, participants provided Judgments of Learning (JOLs) by indicating their likelihood of recognizing that item on a subsequent test. In the recognition phase, participants were asked to indicate all old items, irrespective of instruction. Remember items had higher JOLs than Forget items for all item types, indicating that participants believe they can intentionally forget even emotional information—which is not the case based on the actual recognition results. DF effect, which was calculated by subtracting recognition for Forget items from Remember ones was only significant for neutral items. Emotional information disrupted cognitive control, eliminating the DF effect. Response times for JOLs showed that evaluation of emotional information, especially negatively emotional information takes longer, and thus is more difficult. For both Remember and Forget items, JOLs reflected sensitivity to emotionality of the items, with emotional items receiving higher JOLs than the neutral ones. Actual recognition confirmed better recognition for only negative items but not for positive ones. JOLs also reflected underestimation of actual recognition performance. Discrepancies in metacognitive judgments due to emotional valence as well as the reasons for underestimation are discussed.

Highlights

Directed Forgetting (DF) studies show that it is possible to exert cognitive control to intentionally forget information
This finding is consistent with findings indicating sensitivity to DF instructions in Judgment of Learning (JOL) (Friedman & Castel, 2011) and shows that participants believe they can intentionally forget emotional information as well
Beliefs, DF effect was only found for neutral items, showing that the participants’ predictions were inaccurate with regards to how well they can forget emotional information

Summary

Introduction

Directed Forgetting (DF) studies show that it is possible to exert cognitive control to intentionally forget information. Response times for JOLs showed that evaluation of emotional information, especially negatively emotional information takes longer, and is more difficult For both Remember and Forget items, JOLs reflected sensitivity to emotionality of the items, with emotional items receiving higher JOLs than the neutral ones. Nomi, Rhodes, and Clearly (2013) found that face photographs with negative and positive emotional expressions received higher JOLs than the ones with neutral expressions This was not reflected in actual recognition, in which neutral items were remembered better. While JOLs may be provided on the basis of cues such as repetitions, instructions, and the context of encoding for the information and reflect conscious, theory-based reasoning (Hourihan et al, 2017), they may be based on other cues such as subjective feelings about how well a stimulus has been learned These internal cues are less consciously detectible (e.g., Serra & Metcalfe, 2009). Especially in the case of emotional items, reliance on feelings rather than conscious reasoning in judgments may decrease accuracy

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