title: Thinking about the future can cause forgetting of the past.
abstract: People are able to imagine events in the future that have not yet happened, an ability referred to as episodic future thinking. There is now compelling evidence that episodic future thinking is accomplished via processes similar to those that underlie episodic retrieval. Drawing upon work on retrieval-induced forgetting, which has shown that retrieving some items in memory can cause the forgetting of other items in memory, we show that engaging in episodic future thinking can cause related autobiographical memories (Experiments 1-3) and episodic event descriptions (Experiments 3-4) to become less recallable in the future than they would have been otherwise. This finding suggests that episodic future thinking can serve as a memory modifier by changing the extent to which memories from our past can be subsequently retrieved.
authors: a Department of Psychology , University of California , Santa Cruz , CA , USA.
authors: Annie S
authors: AS
authors: Ditta
authors: a Department of Psychology , University of California , Santa Cruz , CA , USA.
authors: Benjamin C
authors: BC
authors: Storm
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000648:Amnesia, Retrograde / Q000209:etiology* / Q000523:psychology; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Autobiographical memory; Episodic future thinking; Inhibition; Retrieval-induced forgetting