Memories out of order: thought suppression and the disturbance of sequence memory.
Participants in 2 experiments watched a filmed story and then left the lab--with instructions not to think about the film, with instructions to think about the film, or with no instructions. Memories of the film, assessed on participants' return to the lab some 5 hr later, showed reliable effects of thought suppression on memory for the sequence of events in the film. Participants who suppressed thoughts of the film were less able to retrieve the order of events by several measures than were those in the other groups, even thought their retrieval of the events themselves as assessed by recognition, free recall, and cued recall was not generally impaired.
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville 22903, USA. dwegner@virginia.edu
D M
DM
Wegner
F
F
Quillian
C E
CE
Houston
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012691:Serial Learning; D013850:Thinking; D014796:Visual Perception