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When remembering causes forgetting: Electrophysiological correlates of retrieval-induced forgetting

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Author

Summary, in English

People tend to forget information that is related to memories they are actively trying to retrieve. On the basis of results from behavioral studies, such retrieval-induced forgetting is held to result from inhibitory control processes that are recruited to attenuate interference caused by competing memory traces. Employing electrophysiological measures of brain activity, the present study examined the neural correlates of these inhibitory processes as they operate. The results demonstrate that sustained prefrontal event-related potentials were 1) related to whether or not selective memory retrieval was required during reprocessing of previously studied words and 2) predictive of individual differences in the amount of forgetting observed in an ensuing recall test. The present findings give support to an inhibitory control account of retrieval-induced forgetting and are in accord with the view that prefrontal regions play an important role in the selection and maintenance of relevant memory representations at the expense of those currently irrelevant.

Publishing year

2007

Language

English

Pages

1335-1341

Publication/Series

Cerebral Cortex

Volume

17

Issue

6

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Topic

  • Psychology

Keywords

  • ERP
  • inhibition
  • episodic memory
  • cognitive control
  • prefrontal cortex

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1460-2199