Failures to find suppression of episodic memories in the think/no-think paradigm

Anderson and Green (2001) had subjects learn paired associates and then selectively suppress responses to some of them. They reported a decrease in final cued recall for responses that subjects had been instructed not to think of and explained their data as resulting from cognitive suppression, a laboratory analog of repression. We report three experiments designed to replicate the suppression/repression results. After subjects learned a series of A-B word pairs (e.g., ordeal-roach), they were then asked to respond to some items and not to think of other items when shown their cues 1, 8, or 16 times. During a final recall test, they were cued with either a same (direct) probe (ordeal-___) or an independent (indirect) probe (insect-r____). None of our experiments showed reliable suppression effects with either the same or independent-probe tests. Suppression is apparently not a robust experimental phenomenon in the think/no-think paradigm.