The article being analyzed in the following paper can be found under the title of “Unblocking memory through directed forgetting” by Rebecca H. Koppel and Benjamin C. Storm . This article relates to the topic of memory, more specifically, to aspects of memory acquisition and forgetting which will be mentioned in detail later. The purpose of the research done in this article was to observe how list-method directed forgetting affects memory blocking (Koppel and Storm, 2012). Something similar to this concept of memory blocking was covered in a class lecture and in the textbook, the idea of interference, where the recalling of new or old information can be hindered by the presence of other similar information (Hockenbury and Hockenbury, Bhadha, …show more content…
The study was conducted with a total of 144 undergraduates from the University of Illinois at Chicago, who participated with the incentive of some credit for one of their introductory psychology classes (Koppel and Storm, 2012). The materials presented to the subjects included 18 triplets, each one consisting of a target word, a negative prime, and a word fragment, eleven of which were taken from a previous researcher, Tindell (1994), and the other seven were made similarly (Koppel and Storm, 2012). The word fragments were made by removing a few of the letters from the target word and the negative primes where chosen to look similar to the target word, so when the assigned word fragment appeared, the negative prime could appear as the answer, despite it not being able to correctly complete the word fragment (Koppel and Storm, 2012). These triplets were also divided into three groups, one that would at be the negative prime for List 1, another the negative prime for List 2, and the last one would not show up on either (Koppel and Storm, 2012). These lists form the basis for the list-method directed forgetting design, and the directed forgetting aspect coming into play during the actual procedure of the