Intentional and incidental encoding of item and associative information in the directed forgetting procedure

The intentional and incidental encoding of individual words and associations between pairs of words was examined using the item-based directed forgetting procedure. Item and associative recognition were both greater for word pairs followed by a remember (R) cue than a forget (F) cue. Associative discrimination for F-cued pairs was above chance in most conditions, demonstrating that relational informational is encoded incidentally. Item, but not associative, discrimination increased with longer presentation time prior to the cue, indicating that the encoding of item information benefited from maintenance rehearsal but the encoding of relational information did not (Experiments 1A and 1B). The incidental encoding of associations was, though, greater for pairs of words with pre-experimental associations (e.g., needle point), but these pre-experimental associations did not improve memory for pairs that participants tried to remember (Experiment 2). This pattern of results for R- and F-cued pairs mimicked the age-related associative deficit observed by Ahmad, Fernandes, and Hockley (Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 22, 452-472 2015) in comparisons of associative memory between young and older adults.