Directed forgetting of autobiographical memory in mild Alzheimer’s disease Mohamad El Haj 1 , Virginie Postal 2 , Didier Le Gall 1 , and Philippe Allain 1 1 Laboratoire de Psychologie, Universite ´ d’Angers, Angers, France 2 Laboratoire de Psychologie, Sante ´ et Qualite ´ de Vie, Universite ´ Victor Segalen Bordeaux II, Bordeaux, France Using the autobiographical directed forgetting method (Barnier et al., 2007), the present paper addressed the intentional inhibitory processes of episodic and semantic autobiographical memory in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Mild AD patients and healthy elderly people were instructed to either forget or to continue remembering previously generated autobiographical events. In a later recall test they were asked to reconstruct the early-generated memories regardless of the forget/remember instruction. Autobiographical reconstruction was further distributed into episodic and semantic memories. Results showed no forget instruction effect on episodic or semantic autobiographical recall with AD patients, whereas healthy elderly people were able to inhibit only episodic autobiographical memories. The findings suggest an impairment of the intentional inhibitory processes in autobiographical memory with AD and a relative preservation of these mechanisms with normal ageing. They also demonstrate an earlier decline in the intentional inhibitory processes compared to the autobiographical deterioration in AD. Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Autobiographical memory; Directed forgetting; Intentional inhibition. Cognitive inhibition is defined as the ensemble of processes that allows the suppression of pre- viously activated cognitive contents, the clearing of irrelevant actions or attentional focus from consciousness, and the resistance to interference from potentially attention-capturing stimuli (Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1995). On the other hand, autobiographical memory contributes to the trait of Self-knowledge and to self-narratives, enabling the integration of past and present selves and contributing to the sense of identity (Conway, 2005; Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Autobio- graphical memories can be episodic or semantic. Episodic autobiographical memory refers to the ability to remember personal events that occurred in particular spatial and temporal contexts. Semantic autobiographical memory concerns the ability to recollect personal facts and general personal knowledge independent of the learning context (Tulving, 1983, 1993). Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients produce fewer autobiographical memories than do healthy elderly (Addis & Tippett, 2004; El Haj, Postal, & Allain, 2011; Fromholt & Larsen, 1991). This decline is greater with episodic than with semantic autobiographical memories (Addis & Tippett, 2004; Greene, Hodges, & Baddeley, 1995). Auto- biographical decline is not the only cognitive impairment in AD: inhibition decline is also an important feature of cognitive deterioration in the Address correspondence to: Mohamad El Haj, Laboratoire de Psychologie EA 2646, Universite ´ d’Angers, Maison des Sciences Humaines, 5 bis Boulevard Lavoisier, 49045 Angers, France. E-mail: mohamad.elhaj@etud.univ-angers The authors would like to thank Julie Reau for her assistance in recruiting and testing the participants. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. MEMORY, 2011, 19 (8), 9931003 # 2011 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business http://www.psypress.com/memory http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2011.626428