ABSTRACT
Clinical research has typically identified two distinct types of unusual cognitive activities in clinical samples (Christianson, 1992; Stein & Young, 1992). One concerns the presence of intrusive thoughts and memories where processing resources are disproportionally allotted to threatening or negative information (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994). The other concerns impoverished memory for information that derives from diminished encoding or impaired retrieval abilities (Cloitre, 1992). The “excessive” remembering and “excessive” forgetting observed in clinical samples represent the extreme ends of the continuum of human memory and as such warrant systematic investigation. Because the directed-forgetting paradigm demands engagement in enhanced or excessive remembering and forgetting, it has the potential to elicit processing biases that, under other conditions, would remain latent. Thus, the directed-forgetting paradigm not only identifies the balance of remembering and forgetting that occurs among healthy individuals, it can also help us identify the outer limits of remembering and forgetting among humans through the study of clinical populations.
