Abstract
Although we experience thousands of distinct events on a daily basis, relatively few are committed to memory. The human capacity to intentionally control which events will be remembered has been demonstrated using learning procedures with instructions to purposely avoid committing specific items to memory. In this study, we used a variant of the item-based directed-forgetting procedure and instructed participants to memorize the location of some images but not others on a grid. These instructions were conveyed using a set of auditory cues. Then, during an afternoon nap, we unobtrusively presented a cue that was used to instruct participant to avoid committing the locations of some images to memory. After sleep, memory was worse for to-be-forgotten image locations associated with the presented sound relative to those associated with a sound that was not presented during sleep. We conclude that memory processing during sleep can serve not only to secure memory storage but also to weaken it. Given that intentional suppression may be used to weaken unpleasant memories, such sleep-based strategies may help accelerate treatments for memory-related disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Highlights
We experience thousands of distinct events on a daily basis, relatively few are committed to memory
Using a 2 × 2 repeated-measures ANOVA, we found that spatial memory error rates for TBF images were higher than those for TBR images, consistent with more forgetting when instructions were to forget [F(1,29) = 44.73, p = 2*10−7]
As expected, sound-item associations and training patterns were similar for TBF-c and TBF-n conditions (Supplementary Fig. 1)
Summary
We experience thousands of distinct events on a daily basis, relatively few are committed to memory. Forgetting involves the passive decay of memories[4,5], but inhibitory neurocognitive mechanisms may contribute to declining recollective abilities This effect, termed active forgetting, is supported by adaptive, flexible processes that suppress memory-related brain networks[6,7,8]. An outstanding question is whether these inhibitory circuits, established through suppression learning, are strengthened during sleep, as is the case for declarative and nondeclarative memories generally[9] Several memory paradigms, such as extinction and “Think-No Think”[10], have attempted to model active forgetting by using intentional, motivated suppression of memories. If inhibitory memory-suppression mechanisms are adaptively learned, TMR could potentially enhance wake-related forgetting effects in an item-specific
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