Abstract
It is known that self-referential information is easier than non-self-referential information to be encoded and retrieved. This may imply that self-referential information may be difficult to be forgotten. However, memory inhibition research has revealed that one can forget the particular memory by intentional inhibitory control. Thus, we examined whether people were able to intentionally inhibit self-referential information, using the Think/No-Think paradigm (Anderson & Green, 2001). First, participants were assigned either to the self-referential condition or the other-referential condition and were asked to learn cue-target (i.e., word-picture) pairs. After the Think/No-Think phase, participants were tested their final memory performance. Results demonstrated that recall of No-Think items were lower than baseline among participants both in the self-referential and the other-referential conditions. This suggested that intentional inhibitory control processes could also work for self-referential information.
