False fame effects emerge following an internal context shift and are abolished with contextual reinstatement.

Prior research has demonstrated that if you give people a list of nonfamous names and ask them to indicate if the names are famous, 24 hours later, more of these names will be incorrectly remembered as famous than without the delay. This is because while participants are no longer able to recall the specific circumstances in which they previously encountered the names, the names remain familiar and this sense of familiarity is falsely attributed to fame. The present study sought to determine whether a false fame effect would emerge if a daydreaming task, designed to shift participants' internal context, was interpolated between a list of nonfamous names and a list of famous names. Results revealed that indeed, participants erroneously judged more nonfamous names as famous following an internal Context Change. This effect was abolished, however, when the initial context (in which the nonfamous list was studied) was reinstated. Therefore, a contextual-change account of the phenomenon may be appropriate.

Retrieval-induced forgetting is associated with increased positivity when imagining the future.

People often think of themselves and their experiences in a more positive light than is objectively justified. Inhibitory control processes may promote this positivity bias by modulating the accessibility of negative thoughts and episodes from the past, which then limits their influence in the construction of imagined future events. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the correlation between retrieval-induced forgetting and the extent to which individuals imagine positive and negative episodic future events. First, we measured performance on a task requiring participants to imagine personal episodic events (either positive or negative), and then we correlated that measure with retrieval-induced forgetting. As predicted, individuals who exhibited higher levels of retrieval-induced forgetting imagined fewer negative episodic future events than did individuals who exhibited lower levels of retrieval-induced forgetting. This finding provides new insight into the possible role of retrieval-induced forgetting in autobiographical memory.

Explaining retrieval-induced forgetting: A change in mental context between the study and restudy practice phases is not sufficient to cause forgetting.

Retrieving information can impair the subsequent recall of related information. Such retrieval-induced forgetting is often attributed to inhibitory mechanisms, but Jonker, MacLeod, and Seli (2013) recently proposed an alternative account. In their view, the study and retrieval-practice phases constitute two disparate contexts, and impairment of unpractised members from practised categories is attributable to their being absent from the retrieval-practice context, which is where, according to Jonker et al., participants preferentially search at the time of final test. In evidence of this account, Jonker et al. showed that even restudy practice-which is assumed by the inhibitory account to be insufficient to cause forgetting (i.e., retrieval-specificity)-can cause forgetting when a mental context change is inserted between study and restudy. The present research sought to replicate this finding while also testing the possibility that a far mental context change would cause more forgetting than a near mental context change. In Experiment 1, participants described a vacation inside the United States (near) or outside the United States (far). In Experiments 2 and 3, participants described the layout of their own home (near) or their parents' home (far). In contrast to the predictions of the context account, however, but consistent with the predictions of the inhibitory account, none of the restudy-plus-context-change conditions resulted in significant forgetting.

Forgetting as a consequence of retrieval: a meta-analytic review of retrieval-induced forgetting.

Retrieving a subset of items can cause the forgetting of other items, a phenomenon referred to as retrieval-induced forgetting. According to some theorists, retrieval-induced forgetting is the consequence of an inhibitory mechanism that acts to reduce the accessibility of nontarget items that interfere with the retrieval of target items. Other theorists argue that inhibition is unnecessary to account for retrieval-induced forgetting, contending instead that the phenomenon can be best explained by noninhibitory mechanisms, such as strength-based competition or blocking. The current article provides the first major meta-analysis of retrieval-induced forgetting, conducted with the primary purpose of quantitatively evaluating the multitude of findings that have been used to contrast these 2 theoretical viewpoints. The results largely supported inhibition accounts but also provided some challenging evidence, with the nature of the results often varying as a function of how retrieval-induced forgetting was assessed. Implications for further research and theory development are discussed.