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<\/p>\nEveryone has moments in their life that they wish they could forget. It could be that time that you the bridge gave out during your pictures on the water\u00a0or the inevitable newspaper article written about it. But what if you could forget the whole thing happened and block out that embarrassing moment out of your memory forever?<\/p>\n
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(Source\u00a0here<\/a>)<\/p>\n Overtime, you might be able to forget that embarrassing event as you age well into your sixties and seventies, but there is no guarantee, especially if it is this fiasco! Aging is associated with forgetting and as you age, you tend to \u00a0forget where you put your keys, where you parked your car, or why you walked into a room. Cognitive psychologists are concerned with the process of aging and its relationship to forgetting. What is it about aging that makes you forget more? Some researchers attribute forgetting to something called an inhibitory deficit, meaning that older adults are no longer able to control how they ignore interfering stimuli. The ability to exert control and inhibit irrelevant stimuli is evident in the classic Stroop task. Here, the interfering stimuli are a word and the color of the text. The word could be \u201cblue<\/span>\u201d but the text of the word is colored pink. The goal of the Stroop task is to state the color of the text and not the word, so a successful trial would be saying \u201cpink\u201d instead of the word itself (blue). To be successful in this task, you need to be able to control and inhibit that interfering stimuli of the word \u201cblue\u201d. Elderly adults have higher error rates because they lack this inhibitory control and report the incorrect response \u201cblue\u201d instead of pink (West & Alain, 2000). Inhibitory processes are also involved in daily cognitive function, for example, when someone introduces herself using the name Jill, you may be thinking about all your friends and relatives that are named Jill as well. In order to remember the name of the new person that just introduced herself to you, you need to inhibit your friends and relatives that share the same name and focus on remembering the new Jill. Due to a decline in cognitive functioning as we age, this process becomes harder for elderly individuals. The process of controlling what to inhibit and what to focus on that leads Aguirre et al. (2014) to believe that you can selectively forget information, even that time you fell in the water during your prom pictures!<\/p>\n When you hear the word forget, you probably think of something like forgetting where to put your car keys and this type of forgetting is the most widely known and occurs outside of our conscious control, if you could control not to forget where you put your keys, life would be a lot easier! However, researchers now believe that humans can participate in a different and voluntary type of forgetting, selective forgetting. Selective forgetting entails consciously controlling the inhibition of thoughts when prompted to, so if I asked you to forget the sentence you just read, you would be able to do so by using the same inhibitory process shown in the Stroop task. Research on selective forgetting began with the idea that the inhibition of interfering stimuli does indeed occur in the process of forgetting. A primitive list-method directed forgetting (LM-DF) was used first, which involved participants studying one list of words. Immediately after, half the participants were instructed to forget the first list. Participants were given a second list to study and all were told to remember this list. The group that was directed to forget list one recorded higher error rates on list one, meaning that they were forgetting the first list. However, this general list-wide forgetting task does not require specialized inhibitory control and is not specific enough to show age-related differences in older versus younger adults. Current research uses a selective forgetting (SDF) paradigm that is more specific and requires more inhibitory control of stimuli. They hypothesized that because this task is more specific and requires that inhibitory control, researchers would see \u00a0age-related differences in older versus younger adults. In this task, the participant is given a first list of short sentences pertaining to the hypothetical characters of \u201cAlex and Tom\u201d and a second list with sentences about \u201cJoe\u201d. The participant is presented both and is then told to forget anything pertaining to the character Tom. A younger adult is able to better selectively forget the sentences that they heard about Tom because they are able to exert inhibitory control on this part of the list, the same premise behind the Stroop task that allows participants to say \u201cpink\u201d. Although a prom fiasco memory could prove to be more difficult to selectively forget because it may have happened years ago and could be in long term memory, it is this process of control that makes us believe that it could be possible.<\/p>\n Aguirre et al. hypothesized that because older adults lack the ability to exert inhibitory control on stimuli such as the competing lists of information with Tom, Alex and Joe, they would not be able to selectively forget. Researchers did three variations of the SDF paradigm \u00a0to see if their theory that older adults would not be able to selectively\u00a0 forget was accurate. The first experiment was identical \u00a0to the SDF paradigm described above in which participants were either told to remember all the lists or just forget Tom and in between studying the lists they were given math problems to do in order to prevent rehearsal. The first experiment showed that older adults could not selectively forget the information about Tom and was promising evidence that selective forgetting is absent in older adults. However, this experiment is not definitive because of a general low memory performance of all older adults in this task. Another experiment was conducted to reduce the amount of sentences that participants had to remember so that it would improve the overall memory performance of the older participants. This experiment showed the same results as the first. Researchers then did a new experiment similar to the LM-DF paradigm where participants would forget all of list 1 (Alex and Tom). They hypothesized that when you take away the selective nature of forgetting within list one, older adults and younger adults would do the same on the task. This would prove that list dependent forgetting could be done with all ages; it is just the selectivity of the SDF paradigm that requires higher inhibitory control, causing older adults to lack the ability to selectively forget. This is exactly what happened in the last experiment and there were no comparable differences in the rates of forgetting between younger and older adults, allowing researchers to be confident that selective forgetting is not possible in older adults.<\/p>\n So, if you want to forget your prom fiasco, you had better start selectively forgetting now, because if you wait until you are older it may not work!<\/p>\n
\nControlling what to focus on and what to tune out is also a part of the executive control of your working memory. Working memory is a type of memory that is concerned with immediate conscious perception and within this category something called the central executive determines what you pay attention to versus what you ignore. A real life example of central executive functioning would be focusing on a computer screen and tuning out that person talking on their phone in the middle of the library. Working memory is very important, but it is not the focus of the study, so if you want to learn more about it here<\/a> is a link!<\/p>\n