Can people make themselves forget on purpose? If so, do people know that they can make themselves forget information? And furthermore, is having knowledge about one’s performance related to actual (objective) performance on an intentional forgetting task?

A surprising finding in research on human memory is that we can increase recall of to-be-learned information by attempting to forget information learned earlier. Research on directed forgetting looks at the consequences of instructions to intentionally forget recently-learned information. My interest in directed forgetting involves the role that metacognition plays in guiding and informing the intentional forgetting processes. For example, we have found that when people are told to forget a list of words, they are more successful at this task when they use active forgetting strategies (Foster & Sahakyan, 2011; Sahakyan et al., 2013). But it is currently unclear where these strategies come from. Recently, I have investigated the relationship between directed forgetting magnitude and the extent to which a person believes he or she can intentionally forget (Foster, Dunlosky, & Sahakyan, 2015).