Control of access to memory: The use of task interference as a behavioral probe

Directed forgetting and prospective memory methods were combined to examine differences in the control of memory access. Between studying two lists of target words, participants were either instructed to forget the first list, or to continue remembering the first list. After study participants performed a lexical decision task with an additional requirement to respond with a designated key to targets from one or both of the lists. List discrimination performance supported the assumption that contextual representations associated with the two lists are more differentiated following forget instructions. Test instructions which directed participants towards both lists or to particular list(s) were more or less compatible with these contextual representations. Lexical decisions on non-target trials were slower when test instructions were compatible with study contexts compared to when incompatible, indicating that contexts reinstated by test instructions influenced the complexity of memory access. This finding is most compatible with theories of memory which locate an important component of control at the pre-decision stage.