Directed Forgetting of Related Words: Evidence for the Inefficient Inhibition Hypothesis

Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of general psychology 2003-10, Vol.130 (4), p.380-398
Main Authors: Lehman, Elyse Brauch, Srokowski, Sally A., Hall, Laura C., Renkey, Mary E., Cruz, Carmen A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
Age Factors
Attention
Child
children
Children & youth
Cognition & reasoning
Cognitive ability
Cues
directed forgetting
Efficiency
encoding
Female
Humans
Hypotheses
inhibition
Male
Memory
Memory, Short-Term
Mental Recall
Paired-Associate Learning
Practice (Psychology)
semantic memory
Semantics
Set (Psychology)
Taxonomy
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Summary:Fifth-grade children and college students were asked to remember some words and to forget others in an item-cued-directed-forgetting task. Taxonomically related pairs of words and control pairs that were unrelated in meaning were used as stimuli. Children found it more difficult than did adults to ignore forget-cued words that followed asso-ciatively related words that were remember-cued. The results provide support for D. F. Bjorklund and K. K. Harnishfeger's (1990) inefficient inhibition hypothesis (i.e., that the efficiency of inhibitory mechanisms improves as children develop). The results also suggest that the inhibition is occurring primarily in the early stages of processing.
ISSN:0022-1309
1940-0888
DOI:10.1080/00221300309601165