Episodic inhibition

Six experiments examined the proposal that an item of long-term knowledge can be simultaneously inhibited and activated. In 2 directed forgetting experiments items to-be-forgotten were found to be inhibited in list-cued recall but activated in lexical decision tasks. In 3 retrieval practice experiments, unpracticed items from practiced categories were found to be inhibited in category-cued recall but were primed in lexical decision. If, however, the primes and targets in lexical decision were taken directly from the study list, inhibition was observed. Finally, it was found that when items highly associated with a study list were processed in between study and test, no inhibition in recall was present. These, and a broad range of other findings, can be explained by the concept of "episodic inhibition," which proposes that episodic memories retain copies of semantic knowledge structures that preserve patterns of activation/inhibition originally generated in those structures during encoding. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).