Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Previous research has not examined costs and benefits of item-method directed forgetting when requiring participants to report items from memory with their correct identification tags. Tying items to identification tags for remember-both participants, permits assessing the costs and benefits of directed forgetting including identification tags. Doing so requires participants to search memory for both items and their corresponding identification tags. Previous directed forgetting research shows that participants adopt different response criteria when retrieving items from memory based on their assessment of the strength of those items (Goernert, Corenblum, & Otani, 2011). Participants take the view that any item brought into awareness lacking an instructional tag tend to be those that received minimal processing during study. Further, such minimal processing more likely occurred for forget-cued items rather than for remember-cued items. These mental processes are consistent with the memory-strength heuristic suggested by Horton and Petruk (1980) and by Basden and Basden (1998).