The Research On The Role Of Contextual Change In Intentional Forgetting With Different Experimental Materials

Intentional forgetting emphasizes its intentional and directed, mainly investigating internal mechanism of the phenomenon in the experiment:the memory record of study item indicating forgetting is poorer than that of indicating memory. There are two main theoretical explanations at present. One is based on encoding and the other retrieval inhibition. Although they can explain the intentional forgetting effect to some extent, they are still discussed hotly by some psychologists at present.So internal mechanism of intentional forgetting effect is investigating deeply.Changes in context can produce forgetting. The context change hypothesis is a new account of the intentional forgetting response to a "forget" instruction. They found a method of intentional forgetting the list, they induced participants to directly alter their context after List 1 was studied, independent of whether a forget cue was presented.If the intentional forgetting effect results from the changes in contextual cues, then it should be possible to obtain such effects in the absence of forget instructions by merely manipulating participants’ internal context after the presentation of List 1. Many studies show the context change hypothesis provides such a clean, straightforward explanation of the intentional forgetting effect.To test the possibility that context change hypothesis is responsible for intentional forgetting effect, this paper is designed to examine whether the context change will produce the intentional forgetting effect with four types of Chinese characters including the irrelevant material, resemble material, homophonic material and synonymical material. And the study also discusses whether different types of material have different influence on the intentional forgetting effect. The conclusions are as follows:1. The context change induces the intentional forgetting effect.Without a "forget" instruction, it can obtain such effects in the absence of forget instructions by merely manipulating participants’internal context between the presentation of 2 lists.2. Different types of material have influence on the intentional forgetting effect; while as for them, they have different influence on the role of contextual change in the intentional forgetting.3. With the synonymical material, the context change has influence on the intentional forgetting-cost which is obtained by altering internal context of participants. However, the context change has no influence on the intentional forgetting-benefit with the synonymical material.4.With the resemble material, the context change has influence on the intentional forgetting-benefit which is obtained by altering internal context of participants. However, the influence of context change on the intentional forgetting-benefit is task-dependent. Concretely, the forget-plus-context-change has influence on the intentional forgetting-benefit while the remember-plus-context-change has no influence on it with the resemble material.5. The forget-plus-context-change group produced larger costs and benefits than either the forget-plus-non-context-change group or the remember-plus-context-change group with the irrelevant material and homophonic material.