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Abstract

Intentional forgetting is an adaptive process that enbles people to forget episodic information as well as information that was just enoded. Contrary to current views on intentional forfetting, in the present thesis I show that intentional forgetting is driven by different combinations of cognitive processes, depending on whether intentional forgetting of episodic information or intentional forgetting of just encoded information is attempted. Retrieval processes seem to be driving intentional forgetting of information encoded in the past, whereas both storage and retrieval processes seem to be driving intentional forgetting of just encoded information. Importantly, the involvement of retrieval processes in forgetting just encoded information is likely a result of item-specific feature loss and variations in cognitive control abilities predict the storage of relevant information only in this regard. The results from the investigations reported in this thesis are discussed in light of existing theories on intentional forgetting.