Intentional Forgetting of Habits? Combining List-Method Directed Forgetting and Item-Specific Stimulus-Response Priming.

Humans are able to intentionally forget declarative memory content as demonstrated in directed-forgetting (DF) experiments. Yet, only few studies assessed whether DF affects associations in procedural memory. We tested how the intention to remember/forget a stimulus affected the formation and/or retrieval of stimulus-response (S-R) associations. To do so, we combined an item-specific priming paradigm with list-method DF. We did not find an impact of the intention to remember/forget on either the retrieval of existing or the formation of new S-R associations: Although participants formed S-R associations (evident in decreasing RTs over stimulis’ prime instances), their persisting activation did not impact on RTs in a subsequent item-recognition-test. Potentially, processes contributing to item recognition impeded S-R retrieval. This finding is informative for future studies aiming to assess how intention differentially affects procedural and declarative memory. We formulate experimental design recommendations for future studies assessing the impact of DF on item-specific S-R associations.