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Cognitive psychology of human memory (thesaurus)

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Concept information

Preferred term

think/no-think paradigm  

Definition

  • An experimental procedure for studying intentional forgetting of unwanted memories (Anderson & Green, 2001). Subjects are asked to study pairs of semantically unrelated words. They should be able to recall the right word when the left word is presented. An executive control task is then proposed. A cue is presented and subjects must either give the associated response or not think of the response. In the final phase, subjects must recall the response for each pair of words. The results show that memory for words that were given a "no-think" instruction is worse than memory for words that were given a "think" instruction and for words that were given neither a "think" nor a "no-think" instruction.

Entry terms

  • TNT
  • TNT paradigm
  • TNT procedure

Bibliographic citation(s)

  • • Anderson, M. C., & Green, C. (2001). Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control. Nature, 410(6826), 366–369. https://doi.org/10.1038/35066572

    [Study type: empirical study / Access: closed]

  • • Nardo, D., & Anderson, M. C. (in press). Everything you ever wanted to know about the Think/No-Think task, but forgot to ask. Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02349-9

    [Study type: literature review, replication / Access: open]

  • • Singer, A., Darchi, S., Levy, D., & Sadeh, T. (2024). Intentional forgetting needs intentional remembering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(3), 827–836. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001536

    [Study type: empirical study / Access: closed]

  • • Wessel, I., Albers, C. J., Zandstra, A. R. E., & Heininga, V. E. (2020). A multiverse analysis of early attempts to replicate memory suppression with the Think/No-think Task. Memory, 28(7), 870–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2020.1797095

    [Study type: empirical study, replication / Access: open]

Creator

  • Frank Arnould

Dataset citation(s)

  • • Wessel, I., Heininga, V. E., Albers, C. J., & Zandstra, A. R. E. (2022, January 14). Early Attempts at Replicating Memory Suppression with the Think/No-Think task. Retrieved from osf.io/qgcy5

In other languages

URI

http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/P66-JFXTXT0C-4

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