Recent research has suggested that episodic memory can guide our decision-making. Forgetting is one essential characteristic of memory. If certain memories are suppressed to be forgotten, decisions that rely on such memories should be impacted. So far, little research has examined whether suppression of episodic memory would impact decision-making. In the current pre-registered study, the effect of memory suppression on subsequent reinforcement decision-making was examined by combining the Think/No-think paradigm and a reinforcement decision-making task. We found that suppressing memories of learned associations significantly impaired recollected memories of those associations, and participants’ decision bias disappeared after their memory associations were suppressed. Furthermore, the more memory associations participants recalled, the higher decision preferences they exhibited. Our findings provide additional support for the role of episodic memory in reinforcement decision-making, and suggest that suppressing memory associations can lead to behavioral consequences.

最近的研究表明情景记忆可以指导我们的决策。遗忘是记忆的基本特征之一。如果某些记忆被抑制而被遗忘，依赖这些记忆的决策就会受到影响。到目前为止，很少有研究探讨抑制情景记忆是否会影响决策。在当前的预注册研究中，通过结合思考/不思考范式和强化决策任务来检验记忆抑制对后续强化决策的影响。我们发现，抑制习得关联的记忆会显着损害对这些关联的回忆，并且参与者的决策偏差在他们的记忆关联被抑制后消失。此外，参与者回忆起的记忆关联越多，他们表现出的决策偏好就越高。我们的研究结果为情景记忆在强化决策中的作用提供了额外的支持，并表明抑制记忆关联可能会导致行为后果。