A study on the inhibitory mechanism in retrieval-induced forgetting with the explicit/implicit memory paradigm

Anderson, Bjork, and Bjork (1994) devised a retrieval-practice paradigm, thereby showing that remembering can cause forgetting, termed retrieval-induced forgetting. The present research examined what aspect of memory was suppressed by the inhibitory mechanism accompanied by remembering, by using an implicit memory task. Thirty-six undergraduates learned a list of 36 category-instance pairs. They performed directed retrieval practice on some critical items from the learned list by completing a series of cued-fragment recall. Following a distractor task, they then performed either an explicit or an implicit memory task probed by category-plus-first letter pairs. The results indicated the typical pattern of retrieval-induced forgetting in the explicit memory task, but not in the implicit memory task. This suggests that the inhibitory mechanism affects the explicit retrieval process (accessibility) rather than representation of items in memory (availability).