Biomedical subjects

Lili Sahakyan

Publications and source records attributed to Lili Sahakyan.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Directed forgetting in incidental learning and recognition testing: support for a two-factor account.

Instructing people to forget a list of items often leads to better recall of subsequently studied lists (known as the benefits of directed forgetting). The authors have proposed that changes in study strategy are a central cause of the benefits (L. Sahakyan & P. F. Delaney, 2003). The authors address 2 results from the literature that are inconsistent with their strategy-based explanation: (a) the presence of benefits under incidental learning conditions and (b) the absence of benefits in recognition testing. Experiment 1 showed that incidental learning attenuated the benefits compared with intentional learning, as expected if a change of study strategy causes the benefits. Experiment 2 demonstrated benefits using recognition testing, albeit only when longer lists were used. Memory for source in directed forgetting was also explored using multinomial modeling. Results are discussed in terms of a 2-factor account of directed forgetting.

Attention↗

PubMed2004

Destructive effects of "forget" instructions.

In two experiments, participants were given three lists of words to study and were told to (1) remember all three lists, (2) forget the first list immediately after studying it but try to remember the other two lists, or (3) forget the middle list immediately after studying it but try to remember the first and the last lists. In Experiment 1, unrelated word lists were used, whereas Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with categorical lists. The results from both experiments showed that forgetting the middle list leads also to recall decrement for the first list, which was not intended for forgetting. The results are discussed in terms of the contextual change hypothesis of directed forgetting.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

Self-evaluation as a moderating factor of strategy change in directed forgetting benefits.

In list method directed forgetting, instructing people to forget a studied word list usually results in better recall for a newly studied list. Sahakyan and Delaney (2003) have suggested that these benefits are due to a change in encoding strategy that occurs between the study of the first list and the study of the second list. To investigate what might mediate such strategy change decisions, in two experiments we induced both forget and remember participants to evaluate their memory performance on the two lists. In Experiment 1, they were asked to explicitly recall the items from the first list before studying the second list. In Experiment 2, after the study of the first list, the participants provided a rapid aggregate judgment of learning. Evaluation eliminated the differences between the forget and remember groups for the second list in both experiments, because the remember group achieved recall levels comparable to those for the forget group. The role of performance evaluation in mediating directed forgetting benefits is discussed.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

A contextual change account of the directed forgetting effect.

The authors propose that the costs and benefits of directed forgetting in the list method result from an internal context change that occurs between the presentations of 2 lists in response to a "forget" instruction. In Experiment 1 of this study, costs and benefits akin to those found in directed forgetting were obtained in the absence of a forget instruction by a direct manipulation of cognitive context change. Experiment 2 of this study replicated those findings using a different cognitive context manipulation and investigated the effects of context reinstatement at the time of recall. Context reinstatement reduced the memorial costs and benefits of context change in the condition where context had been manipulated and in the standard forget condition. The results are consistent with a context change account of directed forgetting.

Adult↗