Inhibition and interference in the think/no-think task

Five experiments using the think/no-think (TNT) procedure investigated the effect of the no-think and substitute instructions on cued recall. In Experiment 1, when unrelated A–B paired associates were studied and cued for recall with A items, recall rates were reliably enhanced in the think condition and reliably impaired below baseline in the no-think condition. In Experiments 2 and 5, final recall was cued with B items, leading to reliably higher recall rates, as compared with baseline, in both the think and no-think conditions. This pattern indicates backward priming of no-think items. In Experiments 3 and 4, the no-think instruction was replaced with a thought substitution instruction, and participants were asked to think of another word instead of the studied one when they saw the no-think cued items. As in Experiments 1 and 2, the same amount of forgetting of B items was observed when A items were the cues, but in contrast to Experiment 2, there was no increase in the recall performance of A items when B items were the cues. These results suggest that not thinking of studied items or, alternatively, thinking of a substitute item to avoid a target item may involve different processes: the former featuring inhibition and the latter interference.