The Gist-detail Trade-off Of Intentional Forgetting Memory For Continuous Events

In real life, each day we are bombarded with a large amount of information. Of course, we could not store all of them in the brain. This can be regarded as an adaptive function of memory which can enhance our chance of survival. Information with emotionality such as something enjoyable or sad in a travel is very hard to forget. However, this doesn't mean that we can remember all the details. On the contrary, only some parts of the information will be remembered, the other will be ignored, even be forgotten.Little research on intentional forgetting takes emotional continuous events as the material. And did not take the detail/gist trade-off into account, and did not separate peripheral background from central item and gist from situation details. This paper mainly focused on the intentional forgetting of emotional continuous events and the detail/gist trade-off for these emotional events. In order to get a higher ecological validity, we use a video including emotional continuous events to simulate the memory information in daily life.This paper, studied emotional continuity and discontinuity, directed forgetting effect caused by simultaneous memorability instruction and timeliness memorability instruction and the detail/gist trade-off in the course. We designed three 2×2×2 experiments, with one between-participant variable(video type: neutral vs. negative), and two within-participant variables(instruction type: remember vs. forgotten; information type: detail vs. gist). We calculated the recall accuracy rate, correct recognition rate of the to-be-remember fragments, to-be-forgotten fragments and the accuracy rate, correct recognition rate of the detail/gist. The results are as follows.1. Emotional events have their own directed forgetting effect, emotional valence can enhance the memorizing effect of video.2. The relevance of the event content weakens the directed forgetting effect and under the condition of the associated content, forget instruction only weakens the memory of the details.3. Memoria instruction that impact on detail and gist information are not the same, under the condition of forgetting instructions, the recall rate of gist is much higher than the recall rate of detail.4. Timeliness of rendering memory instruction can impair the correlation between events and, therefore, enhance the directed forgetting effect.