Jia Gu¹ (), Laurel B. Walther, Huiyu Ding, Curtis Rogers, Lili Sahakyan; ¹University of Illinois

People regularly make intentional efforts to forget irrelevant or unwanted information. While researchers have consistently observed robust forgetting of verbal information (e.g., words), there has been mixed success in capturing intentional forgetting of visual information (e.g., natural scenes), often observing minimal or unreliable results. To understand intentional forgetting of visual items, this study investigated whether stimulus properties like list structure or image representativeness influence intentional forgetting. Firstly, we implemented mixed and pure study lists using natural scenes to explore the role of stimulus structure. At learning, participants viewed 40 natural scene images, each followed by a remember or a forget cue. In the pure-list condition, all studied images came from the same category, whereas in the mixed-list condition, images were equally selected from five categories. Participants then completed an old-new recognition test with 40 old and 40 new images. Successful directed forgetting would result in better recognition of remember-cue items compared to forget-cue items. Results showed that directed forgetting was obtained in the pure list condition but not in the mixed-list condition, suggesting that intentional forgetting of visual information is more likely to occur when the studied images are from the same category. Additionally, within the pure-list condition, we observed that different image categories exhibit different directed forgetting effects. We then followed up on whether representativeness of images explain these category-specific directed forgetting. In a second experiment, we used naturalistic scenes with goodness-of-exemplar ratings and manipulated the type of stimuli (good vs. bad exemplars). At learning, participants viewed 30 good and 30 bad exemplars of natural scenes, each followed by a forget or a remember cue. Then, they took an old-new recognition test with 60 old and 60 new images. This design clarifies the role of scene representativeness in directed forgetting, offering new perspectives in mechanisms of forgetting visual information.