If you try not to remember something, it really can become more difficult to recall it in future. Now a study of intentional forgetting has found that we can be told to forget things on purpose, and this can happen subliminally, without you even realising.
We already knew that people can consciously suppress memories when asked to. A used visual cues to tell volunteers to remember or forget words while they tried to learn a variety of word pairs. If told to forget a word, a volunteer was less likely to remember it later on.
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Now Raphael Gaillard, at the Hospital Sainte-Anne in Paris, France, and his colleagues have shown that this can work subliminally too. The team first conducted the same experiment with a new group of 44 volunteers, training them to remember or forget in response to clear, conscious cues. They found that volunteers recalled the second word in a pair 83 per cent of the time when given the 鈥渞emember鈥� cue, but only 77 per cent of the time when shown the 鈥渇orget鈥� cue.
Reduced recall
Next, the team ran an experiment where the same participants weren鈥檛 shown these clear cues anymore. Instead, as they tried to learn new pairs of words, the forgetting and remembering cues were flashed on screen for periods of time that were too short for anyone to consciously notice them.
They found that these subconscious cues to forget lowered the average recall rate to 75 per cent, compared with 81 per cent when given subconscious cues to remember. This is the first study to provide experimental evidence that our memories are susceptible to unconscious distortions.
Experiments like these may ultimately lead to new therapies to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder suppress upsetting memories without conscious effort. Such a treatment may help people with PTSD in a way that doesn鈥檛 require them to continuously revisit their traumatic memories, says Brendan Depue, at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. 鈥淏ut we are not quite there yet,鈥� he says.
