2009 Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 123-131
This study investigates whether the directed forgetting effect would be eliminated when the to-be-forgotten word list is semantically related to the to-be-remembered word list. In Experiment 1, in order to ensure the validity of the study lists used in Experiment 2, all the participants studied List 1 and List 2 which both consisted of 15 unrelated words. After learning List 1, half of the participants received the forget instruction telling them to forget List 1. The other half of the participants received the remember instruction telling them to remember List 1 and List 2. After the study session, all participants completed a recall task. The results indicated the directed forgetting effect, where the forget-group participants recalled fewer List 1 words compared to the remember-group participants. In Experiment 2, using the study lists employed in Experiment 1, List 1 and List 2 were semantically related to each other, and these lists consisted words from 15 categories. The results indicated that the directed forgetting effect was eliminated. Thus, this study demonstrates that it is difficult to forget information which is related to information that is to-be-remembered.
