Abstract
ABSTRACTAfter unpleasant events, people often experience intrusive memories that undermine their peace of mind. In response, they often suppress these unwanted memories from awareness. Such efforts may fail, however, when inhibitory control demands are high due to the need to sustain control, or when fatigue compromises inhibitory capacity. Here we examined how sustained inhibitory demand affected intrusive memories in the Think/No-Think paradigm. To isolate intrusions, participants reported, trial-by-trial, whether their preceding attempt to suppress retrieval had triggered retrieval of the memory they intended to suppress. Such counter-intentional retrievals provide a laboratory model of the sort of involuntary retrieval that may underlie intrusive memories. Using this method, we found that longer duration trials increased the probability of an intrusion. Moreover, on later No-Think trials, control over intrusions suddenly declined, with longer trial durations triggering more relapses of items that had been previously been purged. Thus, the challenges of controlling retrieval appear to cause a decline in control over time, due to a change in state, such as fatigue. These findings raise the possibility that characteristics often true of people with psychiatric disorders – such as compromised sleep, and increased demand on control – may contribute to difficulties in suppressing intrusive memories.
Highlights
After unpleasant events, people often experience intrusive memories that undermine their peace of mind
Hellerstedt et al (2016) found that during retrieval suppression, No-Think trials that are accompanied by intrusions show evidence that the unwanted item is briefly retrieved into working memory and is rapidly excluded (i.e., ERP indices of working memory appear and are quickly truncated); in contrast No-Think trials that are not accompanied by intrusions do not show ERP evidence of the unwanted item entering working memory. These findings demonstrate that intrusion reports can isolate involuntary retrieval in the TNT procedure, and that these intrusions can be linked to objective neural indices of elevated cognitive control
The findings of the current study support the conclusion that control over involuntary retrieval is more challenging if it must be sustained for longer periods of time
Summary
People often experience intrusive memories that undermine their peace of mind. We first assessed whether we replicated past work on reports of conscious awareness in the TNT phase (e.g., Levy & Anderson, 2012), by conducting a 2 (condition: Think/No-Think) × 8 (repetition) ANOVA, with short and long duration trials averaged per condition.
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