Different Levels Of Source Monitoring On Directed Forgetting Effect

Directed forgetting is an important paradigm of memory research whichindividuals intentional and successful forget unrelative information. In this paradigm,subjects should disregard or suppress unwanted items to better recall of relative ones.Considering the results of prior literature, participants tended to recall moreremembered items than forgotten ones. If directed forgetting effect impact theperformance in recognition and implicit memory tests is based on the research methodsused in experiment. Directed forgetting effect results in the suppression of unrelatedinformation and the strengthening of target information.One of the theories which influence the effect of directed forgetting is sourcemonitoring. This hypothesis claims that directed forgetting is closely related to theability of source monitoring. Researches of this area were focused on the comparison ofdifferent age groups which indicated that subjects with lower capacity of sourcemonitoring, such as the elderly and children, got less directed forgetting effect. Whetherthe variation of the level of source monitoring, however, could directed affect directedforgetting was unable to determine.Thus homogeneous adult subjects were used in this study to control thedevelopmental factors and the number of source was changed to alter the level ofsource monitoring. In experiment1, different effects between high and low sourcemonitoring were discussed. The role of source monitoring in selective rehearsal andretrieval inhibition was investigated in experiment2. Different types of sourceinformation may work on directed forgetting paradigm through different ways. Thecolor of items as a source information different from list which was not directed relatedto source monitoring was involved in experiment3to investigate the different effects oflist and color. The conclusions are as follows:(1) Alteration of source number effectively manipulate the level of sourcemonitoring, excluding the effect of selective rehearsal.(2) The level of sorce monitoring significantly affect source monitoring.(3) Source monitoring has great influence on retrieval inhibition but not selectiverehearsal.(4) Source monitoring could influence the effect of directed forgetting but not the change of source information.