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Abstract
Freud proposed that unwanted memories can be forgotten by pushing them into the unconscious,
a process called repression. The existence of repression has remained controversial
for more than a century, in part because of its strong coupling with trauma, and the
ethical and practical difficulties of studying such processes in controlled experiments.
However, behavioural and neurobiological research on memory and attention shows that
people have executive control processes directed at minimizing perceptual distraction,
overcoming interference during short and long-term memory tasks and stopping strong
habitual responses to stimuli. Here we show that these mechanisms can be recruited
to prevent unwanted declarative memories from entering awareness, and that this cognitive
act has enduring consequences for the rejected memories. When people encounter cues
that remind them of an unwanted memory and they consistently try to prevent awareness
of it, the later recall of the rejected memory becomes more difficult. The forgetting
increases with the number of times the memory is avoided, resists incentives for accurate
recall and is caused by processes that suppress the memory itself. These results show
that executive control processes not uniquely tied to trauma may provide a viable
model for repression.