Testing The Effectiveness Of Memory Suppression Strategies

The current thesis compared the effectiveness of the direct (blocking memory) and substitution (thinking of something else) memory suppression strategies using the Think/No-Think (TNT) task. Eighty participants completed a TNT task using either the direct or substitution strategy during every occurrence of 12 repetitions for no-think word-pairs. Memory intrusions were reported by participants after each trial and their memory for both the think and no-think words were tested after all TNT trials were completed. A significant memory suppression effect was obtained for memory intrusions but not for either of the two memory tests (same-probe test, independent-probe test). The memory suppression effect also increased for memory intrusions reported by participants as the number of no-think repetitions increased across trials. The memory strategy used by participants did not affect memory suppression (self-reported intrusions or memory test), suggesting that the two memory strategies are equally as effective for suppressing memories. However, future research is needed to support this conclusion, as maintaining strategy compliance throughout a cognitively demanding Think/No-Think experiment was challenging for many of our participants. A failure to replicate a memory suppression effect for either of the memory tests also makes this conclusion more difficult to accept on the basis of the data collected in the current thesis