Skip Navigation


Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on July 31, 2006
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(6):1335-1341; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl044
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
17/6/1335    most recent
bhl044v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Johansson, M.
Right arrow Articles by Mecklinger, A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Johansson, M.
Right arrow Articles by Mecklinger, A.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

When Remembering Causes Forgetting: Electrophysiological Correlates of Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

Mikael Johansson1,2, Alp Aslan3, Karl-Heinz Bäuml3, Andrea Gäbel2 and Axel Mecklinger2

1 Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 2 Experimental Neuropsychology Unit, Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, 3 Department of Psychology, Regensburg University, Regensburg, Germany

Address correspondence to Mikael Johansson, Department of Psychology, Lund University, Box 213, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden. Email: mikael.johansson{at}psychology.lu.se.

People tend to forget information that is related to memories they are actively trying to retrieve. On the basis of results from behavioral studies, such retrieval-induced forgetting is held to result from inhibitory control processes that are recruited to attenuate interference caused by competing memory traces. Employing electrophysiological measures of brain activity, the present study examined the neural correlates of these inhibitory processes as they operate. The results demonstrate that sustained prefrontal event-related potentials were 1) related to whether or not selective memory retrieval was required during reprocessing of previously studied words and 2) predictive of individual differences in the amount of forgetting observed in an ensuing recall test. The present findings give support to an inhibitory control account of retrieval-induced forgetting and are in accord with the view that prefrontal regions play an important role in the selection and maintenance of relevant memory representations at the expense of those currently irrelevant.

Key Words: cognitive control • episodic memory • ERP • inhibition • prefrontal cortex


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 J. Neurosci.Home page
M. Wimber, K.-H. Bauml, Z. Bergstrom, G. Markopoulos, H.-J. Heinze, and A. Richardson-Klavehn
Neural Markers of Inhibition in Human Memory Retrieval
J. Neurosci., December 10, 2008; 28(50): 13419 - 13427.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.