The goal of the current set of studies is to examine the effect of reward motivation on direct forgetting in healthy younger and older adults. Hypothesis: We expect that high compared to low rewards will increase memory for to-be-remembered (TBR) items, compared to low or no reward, but will also reduce the directed forgetting effect compared to a baseline condition of no reward. **Method:** Participants will first complete a typical directed forgetting paradigm with no rewards or punishments to serve as a baseline condition. Words will be presented followed a cue to either Remember the word (RRRRR) or forget the word (FFFFF). In the second block of trials, each word will be presented with a high ($.75) or low ($.01) reward or punishment cue indicating the value of the item if successfully Remembered or Forgotten on the subsequent memory test. In the reward condition, participants will earn that amount of money in the punishment condition participants will avoid losing that amount of money. During the recognition test, all words shown at encoding will be presented one at a time and participants must make an old/new response. Correct responses to target items result in the reward/avoidance of punishment, but incorrect "old" responses (i.e., false alarms) will result in a loss of $.50 to avoid liberal responding. **Participants** will be healthy younger (age 18-35) and older (60-85) adults and the sample will be collected using Amazon Mechanical Turk (*MTurk*) workers. Participants will be paid $4 for study completion in addition to any performance based rewards earned on the task. A power analysis calculated in G*Power based on effect sizes from previous studies (e.g., Spaniol, Schain, & Bowen, 2014) indicated a sample size of 48 participants per group.