Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Instruction to forget a memory after learning can lead to forgetting of the memory. This phenomenon is known as directedforgetting. Instruction to forget cause not only forgetting but also devaluation. Previous evidence demonstrated thatpleasantness of to-be-forgotten words and faces decreased relative to to-be-remembered items. Here, we examined whetherdevaluation by directed forgetting is generalized to food. In our experiment, participants learned pictures of foods andthen received instructions to forget or to remember them. Then, participants rated perceived deliciousness for half ofto-be-remembered pictures and half of to-be-forgotten pictures. Finally, participants took an old/new recognition test forremained pictures. The results showed successful directed forgetting: memory performance of to-be-forgotten pictureswas lower than that of to-be-remembered pictures. Additionally, a similar pattern was observed for deliciousness. Thus,instruction to forget induces devaluation as well as forgetting, suggesting that memory plays an important role in evaluatingthe deliciousness of food.