Do things we don’t seem to be able to remember still influence how we think or the decisions we make? If someone says something, and then says, “never mind” or the court orders something stricken from the record – what happens to it? If we think we can watch scary movies or look at inappropriate photos and it doesn’t affect us – is that true? Does a magic eraser wipe the stimulus clear from our mind?
One of my earliest psychology classes was on memory and cognition. I was fascinated by how we learn and remember things. I was also curious about how we forget things. Forgetting is a useful function. We want to go to where we parked today, not where we parked yesterday. But what about the Freudian concept of “repression”? (If you study psychology at all, you’re going to have to deal with Freud.) It wasn’t a mainline cognition topic, but I couldn’t shake the idea.
Not surprisingly, I conducted a lot of my research on motivated forgetting and related topics. One such niche was “directed” forgetting. In some of the early studies on this theme, participants in a study were presented with a long list of stimuli (usually words) and directed to remember some of the words (based on some visual cue) and ignore or “forget” the other stimuli. Perhaps unkindly, the researchers asked the participants to remember all the stimuli, regardless of whether they had been told to remember or ignore the word. Even with incentives to recall the “ignored” words, participants usually could not remember very many of them.
I was curious as to whether those words had registered at some level and whether they might subconsciously still influence the participants’ thinking. (Okay, maybe still a bit of Freud to deal with.) Using a typical directed forgetting design, I presented lists of words for people to remember or forget. I asked them to recall or recognize words from both categories. The results were the typical abysmal memory for the “forget” words. But, of course, there was a twist. It is research after all. Participants completed a fill in the blank task that was designed so that the words could be completed by either a word from the “remember” category or the “forget” category. On this tasks, they were equally likely to draw on the words from the forget category as the remember category. So apparently, the words were forgotten but not gone.
Granted, this was a low level cognitive task in a controlled environment. But it makes the point that even when we think things are not affecting how we think or the decisions we make, they still might. The moral of the story is to choose carefully the stimuli you subject yourself to.
Puzzle Pieces Coaching 