Enhanced accessibility of ignored neutral and negative items in nonclinical dissociative individuals

While clinical studies showed paradoxical memory phenomena, including the intrusion and amnesia of stressful experiences that are features of dissociation, the results of laboratory studies on dissociative individuals' forgetting of experimental stimuli through cognitive control varied. Some studies demonstrated ineffective inhibition, and others found that dissociative individuals could remember fewer trauma words in a divided-attention context. Dissociative individuals may utilize superior cognitive disengagement to forget the representations. This hypothesis was tested in nonclinical individuals with high, medium, and low dissociation proneness. In the study phase, the participants learned several lists of experimental words and kept updating working memory by remembering the last four items on a list (target) and ignoring those non-target items. A recognition test was then conducted. The high dissociation group performed better on updating working memory. However, the accessibility of the representations of neutral and negative non-target items was elevated. Dissociative individuals disengaged attention effectively from items they intended to ignore, and the representations of the ignored items were more accessible when cues were available.