Forget-me, forget-me-not: Evidence for directed forgetting in preschoolers

The present study challenges the view that directed forgetting is a late developing mnemonic skill. In two experiments preschoolers first learned a list of everyday objects, and were then asked to “empty their heads of these objects to make room for new ones” or to keep them in their minds. Then, a new list of unrelated objects was learned. After a short distractor phase, children were asked to recall the objects. In Experiment 1 (N = 52) children were asked to recall the first list of objects before the second list. No recall order was specified in Experiment 2 (N = 55) to limit potential output interference effects. In both experiments, children who had been instructed to forget the first list had difficulties recalling objects from this list and showed enhanced memory for the items from the other list compared to children who were told to remember. These results establish that young children are already capable of forgetting information that is labeled irrelevant, with positive effects on new learning. Mechanisms underlying costs and benefits of directed forgetting in preschoolers are discussed.