Goal attainment and memory suppression: Zeigernik reloaded

Racsmány, Mihály and Pajkossy, Péter and Demeter, Gyula and Keresztes, Attila (2013) Goal attainment and memory suppression: Zeigernik reloaded. In: ESCOP 2013 - 18th Meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, August 29 - September 1, 2013, Budapest.

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Abstract

In two series of experiments we investigated the effect of goal fulfilment on accessibility of episodic memories. First, based on the pioneering work of Zeigarnik (1927) we developed a novel paradigm to test the role of goal attainment in episodic retrieval. In this task subjects have to complete word stems of category exemplars belonging to a given category, the completion of words were randomly interrupted in half of the categories. Following a delay, unexpected free recall, category-cued recall or recognition tasks were conducted. The results show that subjects tend to recall less items from the completed categories in the free recall task whereas such difference is absent in the category-cued recall and recognition tasks. Second, using a list method directed forgetting (DF) paradigm we found that replacing the forget instruction with a memory test, which informed participants that the learning event is finished, DF phenomena (i.e. lower recall rate of to be forgotten items compared to baseline items) can be simulated. We suggest that a forget instruction in a learning task is an effective goal completion cue. These results suggest that goal completion puts goal-relevant information in an available, but in a less accessible form for later retrieval.

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