Abstract

The present study hypothesized 1) that the forgetting effects would be greater for targets with strong item memory strength because the item to be forgotten is clear and easily accessed by cognitive control process, 2) the forgetting effects would be lesser for the cue-target pairs with strong associative memory strength because the effect of interference from other competitive stimuli associated with the cue is relatively smaller using think/no-think (TNT) paradigm demonstrated the facts that unwanted memory can be forgotten intentionally. In Experiment I, target stimuli had either emotional on neutral content to adjust item memory strength of the target while cue-target pairs were distinguished based on the associative memory strength between cue and target words during a training phase. Results indicated an enhancing effect on the think condition and suppressing effect on the no-think condition following repeated practice given the target contained negative valence rather than neutral valence. In addition, greater suppression was observed when cue-target pairs contained weak associative memory strength. In Experiment 2, instead of targets, the valence of cues was changed to adjust the item memory strength of cue stimuli while maintaining the level of associative memory strength between cue-target pairs. The associative memory strength effect depending on the training level in the learning phase was almost the same as in Experiment 1, but there was no significant difference between valences of cues. The finding indicates that the item memory strength and the associative memory strength have opposite effects on intentional forgetting by the inhibition and interference mechanism respectively.