Suppressing Memories of Past Events Can Trigger Amnesia in the Present, Says a New Study Coauthored by Bard College Psychology Professor Justin C. Hulbert
 

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Trying to suppress memories of past events leads people to forget unrelated experiences from periods surrounding the time of suppression, according to a new study coauthored by Bard College psychology professor Justin C. Hulbert and Richard N. Henson and Michael C. Anderson of the University of Cambridge, and published online today in Nature Communications. The study’s results identify cognitively-triggered amnesia that begins with the voluntary suppression of an unwanted memory as a new mechanism for forgetting. This mechanism may help explain the memory deficits observed in patients suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder or other acute trauma. The full report is available at: www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160315/ncomms11003/full/ncomms11003.html
 
Studying memory retrieval in 381 participants across seven experiments, Hulbert, Henson and Anderson explain the mechanism through which current events may be forgotten. The participants were asked to memorize word-pair associations (such as ‘LEAP-BALLET’). After the first word in the pair was displayed on a computer screen, they were instructed either to think of or suppress the thought of the second word. Occasionally, during the trials, pictures of improbable events were displayed (for instance, an image of a peacock in a parking lot). Following this, memory retrieval was tested by displaying the background of the picture on its own and asking participants to recollect the object associated with it.
 
The authors found that the instruction to suppress the memory of words also made it harder to remember details about objects presented shortly before or after reminders of the to-be-suppressed words. They also used magnetic resonance imaging to scan brain activity of participants during suppression and showed that the impairment of memory formation was directly correlated with the degree of reduced activity in the hippocampus — a brain region known to be essential for the formation of new memories — as well as with the degree of activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex.
 
Justin C. Hulbert is an assistant professor in the Psychology Program at Bard College and principal investigator in the Psychology Program’s Memory Dynamics Lab. He is a recipient of the Walt Disney Company Foundation Scholarship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Tom Slick Research Award in Consciousness for his work on reversibly inducing amnesia through cognitive control. Professor Hulbert works with Bard students to design and test algorithms that harness brainwaves in order to help individuals remember when/what they want to remember and forget when/what they want to forget. His work has appeared in Nature Communications, Cerebral Cortex, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental Psychology, Cognition, Brain Research, Current Biology, and other scholarly journals. Hulbert has a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. For more information on Bard’s Memory Dynamics Lab, visit memlab.bard.edu.(3/15/16)
 

This event was last updated on 03-15-2016

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