ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
published: 01 August 2012
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00269
Do not respond! Doing the think/no-think and go/no-go
tasks concurrently leads to memory impairment of
unpleasant items during later recall
Cornelia Herbert 1 * and Stefan Sütterlin 2
1
2
Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
Research Unit INSIDE, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Edited by:
Michael Dougherty, University of
Maryland, USA
Reviewed by:
Michael Dougherty, University of
Maryland, USA
Tracy D. Tomlinson, University of
Maryland, USA
*Correspondence:
Cornelia Herbert , Department of
Psychology, University of Würzburg,
Marcusstr. 9-11, 97070 Würzburg,
Germany.
e-mail: cornelia.herbert@
psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de
Previous research using neuroimaging methods proposed a link between mechanisms
controlling motor response inhibition and suppression of unwanted memories.The present
study investigated this hypothesis behaviorally by combining the think/no-think paradigm
(TNT) with a go/no-go motor inhibition task. Participants first learned unpleasant cue-target
pairs. Cue words were then presented as go or no-go items in the TNT. Participants’ task
was to respond to the cues and think of the target word aloud or to inhibit their response to
the cue and the target word from coming to mind. Cued recall assessed immediately after
the TNT revealed reduced recall performance for no-go targets compared to go targets or
baseline cues not presented in the TNT. The results demonstrate that doing the no-think
and no-go task concurrently leads to memory suppression of unpleasant items during later
recall. Results are discussed in line with recent empirical research and theoretical positions.
Keywords: memory suppression, emotion, response inhibition, go/no-go task, think/no-think paradigm
INTRODUCTION
Research into motivated forgetting has received increased attention in recent years. One finding from this field of research is that
suppression of an unwanted item increases its availability in memory and enhances recall performance of the item during later recall
tests (Wegner et al., 1987, 1990; Wegner, 1994; Soetens et al., 2006;
Dunn et al., 2009). This ironic memory enhancement effect has
recently been challenged by studies examining memory suppression in the think-no-think (TNT) paradigm (for an overview, see
Anderson and Levy, 2009).
In the classical TNT paradigm participants are instructed to
think or not to think of a target item that has previously been
associated with a cue. For instance, individuals learn that the
words ordeal and roach are associated and are then instructed
to recall the target (roach) when exposed to the cue (ordeal).
At the same time, for certain cues they are instructed to inhibit
memory retrieval of the associated target word by preventing its
content from entering consciousness (Anderson and Levy, 2009).
Additional targets not presented during the TNT serve as baseline.
Results revealed reduced recall for “no-think” targets compared to
“think” or “baseline” targets.
Memory suppression in the TNT might be explained by
inhibitory processes (Anderson et al., 2004). Specifically, it has
been suggested that inhibitory processes involved in thought
suppression during the TNT might be analogues to inhibitory
processes involved in motor response inhibition (Menon et al.,
2001; Garavan et al., 2002). This suggestion has been supported by a number of neuroimaging studies. These studies
found increased activation in fronto-parietal networks involved
in executive control and motor response inhibition during nothink trials in the TNT (Anderson et al., 2004; Depue et al.,
www.frontiersin.org
2007; Levy and Anderson, 2008; Butler and James, 2010). Specially,
activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
involved in inhibiting prepotent motor responses (Simmonds
et al., 2008) has been associated with decreased memory-related
neural activity in the hippocampus during no-think trials (Anderson et al., 2004; Depue et al., 2007; Hanslmayr et al., 2009). Studies
investigating clinical samples such as individuals with attention
deficit/hyperactivity disorder provided further evidence for a relationship between prefrontally mediated motor inhibition and
inhibition of memory retrieval in the TNT (Depue et al., 2010; but
see Salamé and Danion, 2007). In addition, a number of studies
using electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings in combination
with the TNT or a motor response inhibition task reported a positive correlation between the N2 event-related potential component
elicited during the stop-signal task (SST; Logan and Cowan, 1984)
and the N2 event-related potential component elicited during nothink trials in the TNT (Mecklinger et al., 2009). Depue et al.
(2010) reported similar correlational results between the TNT and
the SST in conjunction with functional imaging methods.
Although these findings suggest a common neural system
involved in both motor response inhibition and memory suppression, few studies provide behavioral evidence in favor of
a relationship between motor response inhibition and suppression of unwanted memories. Evidence that processes involved
in motor control can lead to memory suppression comes from
two recent behavioral studies that examined memory retrieval of
emotionally valenced or neutral words after motor response inhibition in the SST (Herbert and Sütterlin, 2011) or in combination
with the TNT (Tomlinson et al., 2009). Results revealed significantly reduced memory performance for unpleasant words that
were presented in stop trials in the SST (Herbert and Sütterlin,
August 2012 | Volume 3 | Article 269 | 1
Herbert and Sütterlin
2011). Tomlinson et al. (2009) found that instructing individuals
to quickly press a button instead of not thinking leads to similar
memory suppression effects as suppressing thought alone.
The results by Herbert and Sütterlin (2011) support an interference effect of motor response inhibition for emotionally valenced
items (particularly unpleasant ones) during the stage of memory acquisition and encoding. The findings by Tomlinson et al.
(2009) suggest that memory suppression during no-think trials in
the TNT could be accounted for by mechanisms other than active
inhibition. In this view, memory impairment in the TNT would
result from interference during the memory retrieval stage and not
from active inhibition during the suppression phase.
There is another line of research that casts doubt on the hypothesis that motor inhibition leads to memory suppression in the
TNT. From the perspective of dual competition models of information processing (e.g., Desimone and Duncan, 1995; Pessoa,
2009) instructing individuals not to respond during no-think trials
could act as a distractor task that decreases the efficacy of inhibition
during no-think trials by directing processing resources away from
memory suppression. Using a retrieval induced forgetting (RIF)
paradigm, Román et al. (2009) provided supporting evidence for
this speculation: in this study, memory suppression during later
recall disappeared when participants had to perform an attention
demanding concurrent task during instructed forgetting.
The present study uses a modified version of the TNT, which
combines the TNT with the go/no-go response inhibition paradigm. Building upon previous research this dual-task version of
the TNT should allow us to determine if processes required for
response inhibition and thought suppression interfere with each
other and if so, how this interference affects active retrieval of
unpleasant targets during later recall.
In particular, if response inhibition and thought suppression
competed for the same class of cognitive processing resources, as
suggested by dual competition models, performance in at least one
of the two tasks should be significantly impaired. In this case, doing
the no-think and no-go task concurrently could even be expected
to result in ironic rebound effects enhancing later recall of the
inhibited items. On the other hand, if motor response inhibition
and thought suppression do not compete for cognitive processing resources because both tasks are inhibitory in nature, possibly
activating a common inhibitory prefrontal control system (e.g.,
Berkman et al., 2009), target words associated with no-go/nothink trials should be significantly less well remembered during
later recall compared to targets associated with go/think trials or
target words that were not part of any intervention. Additionally,
participants should be able to perform both tasks equally well.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
PARTICIPANTS
Participants were 38 healthy, young adults (15 male;
M = 23.1 years; SD = 4.2 years). Participants were recruited via
advertisement in the local newspaper and the posting board at the
University of Würzburg. Exclusion criteria for participation were
current and previous psychiatric, neurological, or somatic diseases as well as medication for any of these. All participants scored
normally on the German version of the CES-D Depression Scale
(Radloff, 1977; Hautzinger and Bailer, 1993) and reported more
Frontiers in Psychology | Cognitive Science
Memory suppression of unpleasant items
positive than negative affect (positive affect: M = 18.8; SD = 6.2;
negative affect: M = 3.6; SD = 3.3) on the PANAS (Watson et al.,
1988) positive and negative affect scales.
Participants received course credit or were financially reimbursed for participation. The experimental procedure was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Participants gave written informed consent prior to participation.
STIMULUS MATERIAL
Seventy nouns were selected from a German word database
(semantischer Atlas1 ) that provides for each word, ratings of
valence, arousal, imageability, and concreteness. All selected
nouns were of negative valence (M = 2.7, SD = 0.3), of moderate emotional arousal (M = 4.5, SD = 0.6), imageability (M = 5.0,
SD = 0.96) and concreteness (M = 4.6, SD = 1.1), and stimuli
were comparable in word length (M = 7.8 letters, SD = 2.2) and
word frequency (M = 12.4, SD = 2.05). The stimulus material was
grouped into 35 cue and 35 target words. Cue and target words
were moderately semantically related (“Leipziger Korpus”2 ).
EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE
Upon arrival, participants were informed about the experimental
procedure in general terms. They gave written informed consent
and filled in self-report questionnaires on mood and current affect.
LEARNING PHASE
The Hint Training procedure (Anderson and Green, 2001) was
used as the learning phase of the experiment. Prior to experimental testing, participants received all 35 cue-target pairs and
were instructed to learn them in such a way that they would
be able to remember the target word when the cue word was
presented. Participants were free to use their best individual learning strategies (e.g., covering and un-covering the second word,
learning the pairs in blocks, etc.). The time limit for the learning
phase was 15 min and could be extended, if necessary, to ensure
that each participant would reach a rate of more than 50% of
correctly remembered target words prior to experimental intervention (Anderson and Green, 2001). Participants were informed
that some of the cue words would either require a response or not
and were asked to remember which of the cues would later require
a response. Participants were given practice blocks to learn the
cue-target associations. Rate of correctly learned word pairs was
tested immediately after the learning phase. Cue words were presented on a computer screen for 4 s, participants were instructed
to read the cue words and remember the related target word by
speaking the target out aloud. The experimenter noted how many
and which of the word pairs were correctly remembered to establish the baseline of individual memory performance prior to the
intervention.
EXPERIMENTAL INTERVENTION
The experimental intervention consisted of a modified version
of the TNT paradigm. Participants were presented with the cue
words from the learning phase (excluding the baseline words).
1 http://dpz.eu/web/docs/semat/semat.html
2 www.wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de
August 2012 | Volume 3 | Article 269 | 2
Herbert and Sütterlin
Cue words were presented in two blocks. Each block consisted
of the same 27 cue words: 18 cues were go/think and 9 cues were
no-go/no-think items. Eight cue-target pairs were selected as baseline trials and not presented during the task. In each block, trials
were presented in randomized order. Participants were instructed
to press a response button with their right index finger as soon
as a word that was previously learned as a go item appeared on
the computer screen. They were also instructed to simultaneously
remember the appropriate target word by speaking it out aloud.
Thus, go trials demanded an overt verbal and behavioral response
in addition to target word remembering. For no-go cues, participants were instructed to inhibit any overt response including
remembering of the target word. Go and no-go items were presented for 1500 ms and followed by an inter-stimulus interval of
1000 ms. Participants had about 2.5 s to respond or inhibit their
responses. Cue words were presented in black letters (font: Times
40) in the middle of the computer screen. The experiment was
controlled by E-Prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools,
Inc., PA, USA).
RECALL PHASE
Immediately after the intervention, participants performed a
cued recall task. Cue words including baseline stimuli which
were not shown in the TNT were presented on a computer
screen in randomized order for 4 s each; participants were asked
to recall as many of the target words as possible by speaking
them out aloud. Correct and incorrect answers were recorded
by the experimenter. A cued recall design instead of a cueindependent design (i.e., using new cues during the recall phase)
was used to make the design compatible with previous TNT
studies using emotional items (e.g., Anderson and Green, 2001;
Depue et al., 2006, 2007) and to control for suppression related
arousal effects. A detailed overview of the experiment is provided
in Figure 1.
Memory suppression of unpleasant items
DATA REDUCTION AND STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
Percentage (%) of correctly processed trials (i.e., correctly
processed go trials and successfully inhibited no-go trials) and
mean reaction times of go trials were calculated. Memory performance (% of correctly remembered targets at pre- and postintervention) was statistically evaluated by a repeated measures
analysis of variance (ANOVA). The ANOVA included “target type”
(go, no-go, baseline) and “time” (pre vs. post) as within subject
factors. Significant main effects as well as interaction effects were
decomposed by post hoc tests (Fisher’s LSD). Pre-post difference
values (%) for each of the three target types (go, no-go, and baseline) were also analyzed in a separate one-way repeated measures
ANOVA design containing the factor “target type” as the within
subject factor. Significant main effects were again decomposed by
post hoc tests (Fisher’s LSD).
RESULTS
REACTION TIMES AND TASK PERFORMANCE
Participants responded correctly in 89.9% of the go trials. In these
trials they responded to the cues by button press and speaking the
target word aloud. Participants’ attempt to perform the dual-task
correctly was also reflected in the reaction time data. The average
response time for go trials was 1488 ms (SD = 445.13). For nogo trials, participants were able to inhibit any response in 89.1%
of trials, which again indicates that participants performed the
dual-task with high accuracy.
MEMORY PERFORMANCE AND ACCURACY (CUED RECALL)
The ANOVA revealed significant main effects of the factors
“target type” [F (2, 74) = 5.7, p = 0.005, η2 = 0.134] and “time”
[F (1, 37) = 13.7, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.27] and a significant interaction effect of “target type × time” [F (2, 74) = 19.06, p < 0.001,
η2 = 0.34]. Post hoc Fisher’s LSD tests revealed no difference in
recall for go targets at post- compared to pre-testing [t (74) = 1.5,
FIGURE 1 | Experimental design.
www.frontiersin.org
August 2012 | Volume 3 | Article 269 | 3
Herbert and Sütterlin
Memory suppression of unpleasant items
p = 0.07], but significant differences for no-go targets [t (74) = 5.2,
p < 0.001] as well as baseline targets [t (74) = 3.5, p = 0.0003]. In
addition, no-go targets were significantly less well remembered
in comparison to go targets [t (74) = 5.2, p < 0.001] and baseline
targets [t (74) = 1.9, p = 0.03] at post-testing. The ANOVA comparing pre-post difference values of go, no-go, and baseline targets
revealed similar significant results for the main factor “target
type” [F (2, 74) = 19.06, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.34] as the full factorial
ANOVA design. Again, post hoc Fisher’s LSD tests showed significantly larger differences in memory performance for no-go targets
compared to baseline targets [t (74) = 1.9, p = 0.03]. This suggests
that memory suppression for no-go targets did exceed effects associated with forgetting over time (memory data for baseline words
pre-post). ANOVA results are shown in Figure 2. Mean values for
recalled targets (%) are presented in Table 1.
DISCUSSION
By combining the classical TNT and go/no-go paradigms this
study investigated how doing the no-think and no-go tasks concurrently influences memory of unpleasant items during later
recall. Instructions not to think and not to respond to the cues
significantly reduced memory retrieval of targets that were previously learned to be associated with no-go/no-think cues. Memory
impairment for no-go/no-think targets during later recall was
found both in comparison to targets that participants were allowed
FIGURE 2 | Memory effects. Recall performance of targets associated
with go, no-go, and baseline cue words prior to (dark lines) and after
intervention (gray lines). Error bars represent standard errors.
Table 1 | Mean values (%) of memory performance in all conditions.
Trials
Correctly recalled targets (%)
Pre-test
Post-test
Goa
66.5 (2.04)
70.3 (2.73)
+3.8 (2.04)
No-goa
67.2 (2.44)
52.9 (3.49)
−14.3 (2.75)
Baselinea
65.5 (2.77)
57.6 (3.32)
−7.9 (2.33)
a
Standard errors are presented in parentheses.
Frontiers in Psychology | Cognitive Science
Difference
to think of during go/think trials as well as in comparison to
baseline targets that were not subject of any intervention at all.
The results contradict earlier studies predicting paradoxical
effects of memory suppression. Regarding paradoxical effects, it
has been argued that interventions that prompt individuals not to
think and/or not to show any overt behavioral response maintain
or even increase the accessibility of suppressed targets into conscious awareness, leading to ironic rebound effects at later retrieval
(e.g., Wegner et al., 1987, 1990).
Likewise, it has been speculated that instructing subjects not to
respond during no-think trials could act as a distracting task that
consumes processing resources, which are then not available for
memory inhibition (Román et al., 2009).
In contrast to this speculation, individuals of our study were
able to accurately perform the two tasks. There were very few
no-go/no-think and go/think trials with intrusions suggesting
no competition of processing resources when TNT and motor
response inhibition tasks are combined. Nevertheless, this does not
mean that processes involved in thought suppression and response
inhibition are unrelated. Neurocognitive studies demonstrated
that on a neural level, processes involved in motor inhibition
and memory suppression are closely related (Mecklinger et al.,
2009; Depue et al., 2010), that memory suppression in the TNT
activates prefrontal brain regions involved in motor inhibition
(Anderson et al., 2004; Depue et al., 2007) and that activation of
these prefrontal control regions is associated with decreased activity in memory structures such as the hippocampus (Anderson
et al., 2004; Depue et al., 2007; Hanslmayr et al., 2009). Viewed
from a neurophysiological perspective, it is likely that thought
and response inhibition activate a common neuronal control system, which in turn exerts an inhibitory influence on subcortical
memory structures such as the hippocampus leading to memory
impairments for no-go/no-think targets during later recall.
Still, it could be argued that memory suppression effects during
later recall are not the result of inhibitory processes. Tomlinson
et al. (2009), for instance, suggested that effects in the TNT in
general can result from memory interference during both stages
of recall. The explanation by Tomlinson and colleagues offers a
non-inhibitory explanation to results found in the TNT suggesting interference at the second (recovery) stage rather than just at
the first sampling stage. However, this model has been debated
(see Bäuml and Hanslmayr, 2010) and thus, as annotated by
Huber et al. (2010), future studies are needed to scrutinize its
assumptions.
It has been shown that memory suppression increases in
strength with the number of times a word is inhibited during the
TNT (e.g., Anderson and Green, 2001). Relatedly however, learning of new memory associations might increase with repeated
suppression trials. In our study, only few no-go/no-think repetitions were used – perhaps not enough to establish strong new
memory associations. This suggests that in the context of two
inhibitory tasks including motor and thought suppression, memory suppression can be obtained even after a few intervention
blocks.
Nevertheless, the results of the present study are challenged
by some methodological limitations that could be improved in
future studies. Our results demonstrate reduced recall of unwanted
August 2012 | Volume 3 | Article 269 | 4
Herbert and Sütterlin
Memory suppression of unpleasant items
memories when suppression of unpleasant memory content on a
cognitive level (i.e., attempts not to think) and inhibition of prepotent responses to these contents on a behavioral level (motor
response inhibition) are combined. Both inhibitory tasks were performed equally well, suggesting complementary effects of motor
response inhibition and memory inhibition, and no competition of cognitive processing resources. However, given that in
the present study instructions not to think and not to respond
were perfectly correlated, and no further control conditions were
included in which participants performed one of the two tasks
alone (no-think vs. not to respond), the present design is unable
to determine the relative impact of response inhibition on memory suppression. Indeed, a fully balanced design including TNT
conditions with and without response inhibition could extend the
present findings and offer additional insight into how motor inhibition influences intentional thought suppression processes and
how inhibitory effects spillover from one instruction to the other.
Furthermore, memory tests using new cues during recall could
be used to better understand the nature of inhibitory effects, i.e.,
if effects of response inhibition in the TNT are independent from
associative priming effects or response biases related to the original
cues. With this regard, however, care will have to be taken that cues
used during the learning phase and the retrieval phase are matched
REFERENCES
Anderson, M. C., and Green, C. (2001).
Suppressing unwanted memories
by executive control. Nature 410,
366–369.
Anderson, M. C., and Levy, B. J. (2009).
Suppressing unwanted memories.
Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 18, 189–194.
Anderson, M. C., Ochsner, K. N.,
Kuhl, B., Cooper, J., Robertson, E.,
Gabrieli, S. W., Glover, G. H., and
Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2004). Neural systems underlying the suppression of
unwanted memories. Science 303,
232–235.
Aron, A. R. (2007). The neural basis
of inhibition in cognitive control.
Neuroscientist 13, 214–228.
Bäuml, K. H., and Hanslmayr, S. (2010).
Forgetting in the no-think paradigm: interference or inhibition?
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, E3.
Berkman, E. T., Burklund, L., and
Lieberman, M. D. (2009). Inhibitory
spillover: intentional motor inhibition produces incidental limbic inhibition via right inferior frontal cortex. Neuroimage 47, 705–712.
Butler, A. J., and James, K. H. (2010).
The neural correlates of attempting to suppress negative versus neutral memories. Cogn. Affect. Behav.
Neurosci. 10, 182–194.
Depue, B. E., Banich, M. T., and Curran, T. (2006). Suppression of emotional and non-emotional content
in memory: effects of repetition on
cognitive control. Psychol. Sci. 17,
441–447.
Depue, B. E., Burgess, G. C., Willcutt, E. G., Ruzic, L., and Banich,
www.frontiersin.org
M. T. (2010). Inhibitory control of
memory retrieval and motor processing associated with the right lateral prefrontal cortex: evidence form
deficits in individuals with ADHD.
Neuropsychologia 48, 3909–3917.
Depue, B. E., Curran, T., and Banich,
M. T. (2007). Prefrontal regions
orchestrate suppression of emotional memories via a two-phase
process. Science 317, 215–219.
Desimone, R., and Duncan, J. (1995).
Neural mechanisms of selective
visual attention. Annu. Rev. Neurosci.
18, 193–222.
Dunn, B. C., Billotti, D., Murphy, V.,
and Dalgleish, T. (2009). The consequences of effortful emotion regulation when processing distressing material: a comparison of suppression and acceptance. Behav. Res.
Ther. 47, 761–773.
Garavan, H., Ross, T. J., Murphy, K.,
Roche, R. A., and Stein, E. A.
(2002). Dissociable executive functions in the dynamic control of
behavior: inhibition, error detection, and correction. Neuroimage 17,
1820–1829.
Hanslmayr, S., Leipold, P., Pastötter, B.,
and Bäuml, K. H. (2009). Anticipatory signatures of voluntary memory suppression. J. Neurosci. 29,
2742–2747.
Hautzinger, M., and Bailer, M. (1993).
Allgemeine Depressions Skala. Manual. Göttingen: Beltz Test GmbH.
Herbert, C., and Sütterlin, S. (2011).
Response inhibition and memory retrieval of emotional target
words: evidence from an emotional
for emotional arousal, because there is evidence that differences in
stimulus arousal can influence suppression effects in the TNT (e.g.,
Depue et al., 2007; Marx et al., 2008).
In sum, the present study investigated inhibitory effects across
modalities (thought and response inhibition) and studied their
interaction (interference vs. complementary effects) on later memory. The results link directly to an increasingly relevant stream
of research interested in the relationship between inhibitory
processes involved in different tasks and processes. The findings strengthen previous speculations of cross-modality effects,
supporting suggestions of a common inhibitory control system
underlying thought and response control (e.g., Berkman et al.,
2009; for review Aron, 2007).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Angelika Krieger-Behr for help with data acquisition and
analysis. We thank Michael Anderson for his comments on a previous version of this manuscript. We also thank Michael Dougherty
and the reviewers for their very helpful comments regarding this
manuscript and their inspiration for future work. This publication
was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the
University of Wuerzburg in the funding programme Open Access
Publishing.
stop-signal task. J. Behav. Brain Sci.
1, 153–159.
Huber, D. E., Tomlinson, T. D., Rieth,
C. A., and Davelaar, E. J. (2010).
Reply to Bäuml and Hanslmayr:
adding or subtracting memories?
The neural correlates of learned
interference vs. memory inhibition. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
107, E4.
Levy, B. J., and Anderson, M. C. (2008).
Individual differences in the suppression of unwanted memories:
the executive deficit hypothesis. Acta
Psychol. 127, 623–635.
Logan, G. D., and Cowan, W. B.
(1984). On the ability to inhibit
thought and action: a theory of
an act of control. Psychol. Rev. 91,
295–327.
Marx, B. P., Marshall, P. J., and Castro, F. (2008). The moderating effects
of stimulus valence and arousal on
memory suppression. Emotion 8,
199–207.
Mecklinger, A., Parra, M., and Waldhauser, G. T. (2009). ERP correlates
of intentional forgetting. Brain Res.
1255, 132–147.
Menon, V., Adleman, N. E., White, C. D.,
Clover, G. H., and Reiss, A. L. (2001).
Error-related brain activation during a Go/NoGo response inhibition
task. Hum. Brain Mapp. 12, 131–143.
Pessoa, L. (2009). How do emotion and
motivation direct executive control?
Trends Cogn. Sci. 13, 160–166.
Radloff, L. S. (1977). The CES-D scale:
a self-report depression scale for
research in the general population.
Appl. Psychol. Meas. 1, 385–401.
Román, P., Soriano, M. F., GómezAriza, C. J., and Bajo, M. T.
(2009). Retrieval-induced forgetting
and executive control. Psychol. Sci.
20, 1053–1058.
Salamé, P., and Danion, J. M. (2007).
Inhibition
of
inappropriate
responses is preserved in the
think-no-think and impaired in the
random number generation tasks in
schizophrenia. J. Int. Neuropsychol.
Soc. 13, 277–287.
Simmonds, D. J., Pekar, J. J., and
Mostofsky, S. H. (2008). Metaanalysis of Go/No-go tasks demonstrating that fMRI activation associated with response inhibition
is task-dependent. Neuropsychologia
46, 224–232.
Soetens, B., Braet, C., Dejonckheere,
P., and Roets, A. (2006). When
suppression backfires – the ironic
effects of suppressing eating-related
thoughts. J. Health Psychol. 11,
655–668.
Tomlinson, T. D., Huber, D. E.,
Rieth, C. A., and Davelaar,
E. J. (2009). An interference
account of cue-independent forgetting in the no-think paradigm.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106,
15588–15593.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., and Tellegen,
A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS
scales. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 54,
1063–1070.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes
of mental control. Psychol. Rev. 101,
34–52.
August 2012 | Volume 3 | Article 269 | 5
Herbert and Sütterlin
Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter,
S. R., and White, T. L. (1987).
Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 53,
5–13.
Wegner, D. M., Shortt, J. W., Blake,
A. W., and Page, M. S. (1990).
The suppression of exciting
thoughts. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 58,
409–418.
Memory suppression of unpleasant items
Conflict of Interest Statement: The
authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that
could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Received: 20 November 2011; accepted:
15 July 2012; published online: 01 August
2012.
Frontiers in Psychology | Cognitive Science
Citation: Herbert C and Sütterlin S
(2012) Do not respond! Doing the
think/no-think and go/no-go tasks concurrently leads to memory impairment of unpleasant items during later
recall. Front. Psychology 3:269. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00269
This article was submitted to Frontiers in
Cognitive Science, a specialty of Frontiers
in Psychology.
Copyright © 2012 Herbert and Sütterlin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source
are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party
graphics etc.
August 2012 | Volume 3 | Article 269 | 6