A Developmental Study Of Cognitive Inhibition On The Directed Forgetting

Remembering effective information was very important, and forgetting invalid information was also very necessary.The successfully forgetting of invalid、irrelevant information、or the specified materials has been called directed forgetting, also known as intentional forgetting、 point to amnesia or directed forgetting.It emphasized the deliberate and point of forgetting. Using item paradigm and list paradigm study the internal mechanism of memory item performance significantly better than forget item on directed forgetting.There are two main theoretical explanations at present,the encoding and retrieval inhibitory theory.Most previous studies only selected college students as the subjects, the fewer development study of different ages on directed forgetting cognitive inhibition usually use a single test method to study, and the outcome of these findings is different on the different frequency material.Thus, the item paradigm was used in this experiment to explore the directed forgetting effect in both explicit and implicit tests by word frequency and ages(grades 3,5,8 and college students).The results indicated:(1)Directed forgetting effect occurred in both the explicit test and implicit test of the all grades;(2)Directed forgetting effect occurred in both the explicit test and implicit test of high and low frequency word;(3)The average recall score of each grade was significantly different in the explicit test, showing the inhibition of subjects has been developing with the growth of age,while the performance between the various grades were not significant different in the implicit test;(4)The item paradigm directed forgetting might be the result of selective encoding and retrieval inhibition.