Mechanisms Of The Directed Forgetting Effect In Emotional Faces

Intentional forgetting refers to that individuals are more conscious to forget outdated or invalid information to improve the efficiency of memory system.Directed forgetting paradigm is one of the paradigms what researchers often use to discuss the phenomenon of active forgetting,the occurrence of directed forgetting effect means that participants can adopt top-down strategies to actively limit the memory of forgetting items under experimental conditions.At present,the mechanism of directed forgetting effect is still controversial.On the one hand,some researchers believe that selective coding is the main reason for the directed forgetting effect,the difference in performance on the remembered-and forgotten-items reflects the difference in the coding phase.On the other hand,selective coding could not explain some phenomena,such as the disappearance of directed forgetting effect in pictures after the time of cue occurrence was prolonged.Therefore,researchers proposed the theory of inhibition control,which believed that forgetting cue would block the extraction or weaken the trace of forgetting item.What’s more,previous studies have used different experimental materials,including words,pictures and faces,etc.,while the processing of different materials is different.Moreover,most studies have only compared words and pictures,and have not discussed the mechanism of directional forgetting effect in faces.We believe that faces are different from other materials in that they have more social attributes and more complex processing.So is the occurrence of directional forgetting effect in faces due to selective coding or inhibitory control?Social interaction include not only verbal communication,but also body language,especially the expressions.We can read the other person’s emotions,attitudes and whether they are satisfied with the current communication.It can be seen that facial expressions promote understanding of language,which includes more basic cognitive processes,such as facilitating character identification and enhancing impressions of the individual.But the promoting effect of angry and happy expression is different.Previous research results on directed forgetting also showed that it was more difficult for individuals to actively forget emotional information,especially negative information.Could angry and happy expression improve participants’memory performance,leading to changes in directed forgetting?At the same time,since both expression perception and cognitive processes are affected by the gender of the face,are the results of previous studies affected by the gender of the face?Is a type of face easier to recognize and remember?This study explored the effects of emotional expression and face’s gender on directed forgetting effect through three experiments,and clarified the mechanism of directed forgetting effect in emotional face.Experiment 1 used the item directed forgetting paradigm to verify the effect of emotional expression and face gender on directed forgetting effect.Based on the results of experiment 1,experiment 2 changed the presentation time of materials in the learning stage to find out whether there was selective coding in the processing of emotional faces.Experiment 3 provides empirical evidence for the inhibition control theory by combining the method of cognitive cues.Experiment 1 showed that angry faces scored significantly better than happy faces,compared male face,female face performed better too;The results of experiment 2 showed that the effect of directed forgetting gradually decreased or even disappeared with the increase of the material presentation time in the learning stage,indicating that the difference in performance between the remembered items and the forgotten items was not due to selective coding.The results of experiment 3 showed that,compared with the non-cue,the recognition performance of individuals was higher when the cue was presented,especially the forgetting items.The appearance of cognitive cue lifted the inhibition control and promoted the recognition of faces.Based on this,this study has drawn the following three conclusions:（1）compared with the happy expression,the angry expression can promote the encoding and consolidation of information;（2）the recognition and memory of female faces is better than that of male faces;（3）The directed forgetting effect in emotional faces is not selectively encoded,and is more likely due to inhibitory control.