Suppressing Autobiographical Memories Elicited by External Stimuli
Karina Andrade Andrade
Department of Psychology
Faculty Supervisor: Ezequiel Morsella
Autobiographical memories are often triggered in an automatic way by environmental cues and sometimes enter our awareness even when we attempt to suppress them. The present study investigates whether visual cognitive load, involving working memory, enhances the ability to prevent involuntary memory intrusions. Most autobiographical memories are visual in nature. Hence, occupying the visual buffer should interfere with the retrieval of these memories. Participants are presented with cue words (e.g., "BEACH") associated with everyday experiences and are instructed to avoid thinking of any autobiographical memories when presented with each word. In the Baseline condition, there is no cognitive load. In the Visual condition, participants must perform a visual 2-back task, a task involving visual working memory and the visual buffer. For the sake of comparison, in the Verbal condition, participants must perform a verbal version of the 2-back task. We predict that the Visual condition will yield the lowest rates of involuntary memories. We discuss the implications of this potential finding for treatments of psychopathologies involving debilitating, intrusive memories.