The Role Of Retrieval Practice In Intentional Forgetting

Intentional forgetting emphasizes it is intentional and directed, mainly investigatinginternal mechanism of the phenomenon in the experiment: the memory record of study itemindicating forgetting is poorer than that of indicating memory. There are two main theoreticalexplanations at present. One is based on encoding and the other retrieval inhibition. Thelonger standing position emphasizes retrieval inhibition, but little is known about the exactmechanism that produces it.Theory of retrieval-induced forgetting emphasizes that the competition between targetitems and relevant items in recalling can lead to forgetting.Many studies show retrieval inhibition in forgetting can be interpreted as consistent withthe retrieval-induced forgetting interpretation. Retrieval-induced forgetting provides such aclean, straightforward explanation of retrieval inhibition in intentional forgetting.To test the possibility that retrieval-induced forgetting is responsible for intentionalforgetting, this paper is designed to examine whether list 2 retrieval practice will increase theintentional forgetting effect with four types of Chinese characters including the irrelevantmaterial, resemble material, homophonic material and synonymical material. And the studyalso discusses whether different types of material have different influence on the intentionalforgetting effect. The conclusions are as followings:1. Different types of material have different influence on the intentional forgetting effect.Without list 2 retrieval pratice, the intentional forgetting effect is indicated with homophonicand synonymical material. With list 2 retrieval practice once, the intentional forgetting effectis indicated with irrelevant material. With list 2 retrieval pratice for three times, the intentionalforgetting effect is indicated with homophonic and resemblant material.2. List 2 retrieval practice increases the recall with homophonic and resemblant material,while as for different groups, it has different influence on the recall of the two lists withirrelevant and synonymical material.3. More retrieval practice induces the intentional forgetting effect with resemblantmaterial, but eliminates the intentional forgetting effect with synonymical material.4. With more retrieval practices, the participants of the forgetting instruction group donot inhibit more recall of list 1. There is no evidence that list 2 retrieval pratice can increasethe intentional forgetting effect.