People sometimes falsely deny having experienced an event. In the current experiments, we examined the effect of false denials on forgetting and false memory formation. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with emotionally-negative and neutral associatively related word lists known to engender false memories. After encoding, half of the participants had to falsely deny having seen the words while the other half had to tell the truth. During a final memory test (recall or source monitoring task), participants who falsely denied forgot that they discussed certain words with an experimenter. Furthermore, the act of falsely denying reduced the formation of false memories. These results were partially replicated in Experiment 2 where participants also had to re-learn several words and received a second memory task. This latter design feature diminished the effect of false denials on false memory creation. Our experiments suggest that false denials not only have negative consequences (forgetting), but can have positive ones too (reduction in false memories).

人们有时会错误地否认经历过某个事件。在当前的实验中，我们检查了错误拒绝对遗忘和错误记忆形成的影响。在实验1中，向参与者展示了会引起虚假记忆的情绪负面和中性联想相关的单词表。编码后，一半的参与者不得不错误地否认看到了这些单词，而另一半则不得不说出真相。在最终的内存测试（召回或源监视任务）中，错误地拒绝参加的参与者忘记了自己与实验者讨论了某些单词。此外，错误否认的行为减少了错误记忆的形成。这些结果在实验2中得到了部分复制，参与者还必须重新学习几个单词并接受第二项记忆任务。后一种设计功能减少了错误拒绝对错误内存创建的影响。我们的实验表明，错误的拒绝不仅会带来负面的后果（忘记），而且还会带来积极的后果（减少错误的记忆）。