We report three item-method directed forgetting (DF) studies to evaluate whether DF impairs primarily item memory, or whether it also impairs associative memory. The current studies used a modified associative recognition paradigm that allowed disentangling item impairment from associative impairment in DF. Participants studied scene-object…

Previous studies have revealed that creative advertisements are recognized and recalled better than their less creative counterparts. Remembering and forgetting are two sides of the same coin of memory, denoting memory's storage and elimination functions, respectively, which can both potentially impact advertising effectiveness. To date, there…

Purpose: While much empirical research has examined how routines are unlearned, little is known about the intentional forgetting of rules in organizations. This paper aims to combine the literature on organizational rules and that on intentional forgetting with the aim of studying the relationship between power types of rule imposition and the…

Sleep right after studying new material is more conducive to memory than a period of wakefulness. Another way to counteract forgetting is to practice retrieval: taking a test strengthens memory more effectively than restudying the material. The current work aims at investigating the interaction between sleep and testing by asking if testing adds…

Purpose: This paper aims to evaluate how managers influence accidental and intentional organizational forgetting, i.e. knowledge depreciation, knowledge loss and unlearning. Design/methodology/approach: The literature was reviewed based on predetermined search terms to identify peer-reviewed articles published in English and available in full-text…

A 2nd-grade teacher who never cared much about birthdays made them part of her classroom routine once she saw how important they were to her students. But forgetting a student's birthday on a chaotic Friday afternoon led her to question whether these kinds of celebrations should be her responsibility.

From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Maori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of 'forgetting' the nation's contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the…

Teachers often face complex educational judgments and research has shown that teachers are prone to be influenced by unrelated information in their judgments and decisions. To investigate the influence of potential misinformation we employed a list-method directed forgetting paradigm and investigated a simulated judgment scenario, in which…

Delay-induced forgetting refers to the finding that memory for studied material typically decreases as the delay between study and test is increased. The results of 3 experiments are reported designed to examine whether this form of forgetting is primarily caused by interference effects or contextual drift effects when people engage in neutral…

Learning and forgetting curves are not only integral issues for courses in introductory psychology, they are also of high practical relevance to students when it comes to the formation of realistic goals and expectations on learning outcomes. A paper-and-pencil-study investigated how well students of psychology (N = 82) have internalized the…

Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide a foundation for human resource development (HRD) scholars in attempts to devise mechanisms for establishing and facilitating actionable pathways through which unlearning can be acknowledged and serve as a contributing agent for HRD interventions. This paper concludes with a call to…

Directed forgetting tasks instruct people to forget targeted memoranda. In the context of working memory, people attempt to forget representations that are currently held in mind. Here, we evaluated candidate mechanisms of directed forgetting within working memory, by (a) testing the influence of articulatory suppression, a rehearsal-reducing and…

We investigated whether selective discussion of autobiographical memory narratives would impact the quality of young people's recall of their nondiscussed memory narratives. Children (ages 8-9 years, n = 65) and adolescents (ages 13-15 years, n = 58) completed an adapted version of the retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) paradigm for self-generated…

Prevalent security threats caused by human errors necessitate security education, training, and awareness (SETA) programs in organizations. Despite strong theoretical foundations in behavioral cybersecurity, field evidence on the effectiveness of SETA programs in mitigating actual threats is scarce. Since memory decay will inevitably occur after…

Human memory is malleable by both social and motivational factors and holds information relevant to workplace decisions. Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) describes a phenomenon where retrieval practice impairs subsequent memory for related (unpracticed) information. We report two RIF experiments. Chinese participants received a mild self-threat…