A context-change account of temporal distinctiveness

Siefke, Brian Michael; Smith, Troy A.; Sederberg, Per B.

doi:10.3758/s13421-019-00925-5

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…We allowed for two distinct drift values, , the standard drift (implemented for low-RPE events), and d , a β higher level of drift for high-RPE events. This approach (i.e., increased drift in response to high-RPE events) is in line with how contextual disruptions due to salient changes have been previously modeled (Horner et al, 2016;Polyn et al, 2009;Siefke et al, 2019). We moreover use d for the first item presented to the network as a way of capturing classic primacy effects in memory (i.e., the higher probability of retrieving the first item in a sequence; see 7.5 for further discussion of how primacy is modeled here, compared to how it is usually modeled in CMR).…”

Section: Updating Temporal Context and Associative Matrices During Resupporting

confidence: 73%

“…In our paradigm, these two factors (RPE and shift-in-latent-cause) were confounded --in future work, we can try to unconfound them (e.g, by having isolated high-reward or low-reward items that do not indicate a lasting change in the underlying mean reward value). Related to this point, Siefke et al (2019) recently ran a study that attempted to unconfound context change and prediction error, using stimuli that varied in their background color; results from that study supported the hypothesis that context change, not prediction error per se , is the key determinant of discontinuities in mental context. More work is needed to see if this applies to our RPE paradigm.…”

Section: High Rpes Form Event Boundaries In Memorymentioning

confidence: 92%

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Reward prediction errors create event boundaries in memory

et al. 2020

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We remember when things change. Particularly salient are experiences where there is a change in rewards, eliciting reward prediction errors (RPEs). This feature of memory may be useful because it can help us find greater rewards and avoid lesser ones in the future. How do RPEs influence our memory of those experiences? One idea is that this signal directly enhances the encoding of memory. Another, not mutually exclusive, idea is that the RPE signals a deeper change in the environment, and leads to the mnemonic separation of subsequent experiences from what came before, thereby creating a new latent context and a more separate memory trace. We tested this in four experiments in which participants learned to predict rewards associated with a series of images within visually-distinct "rooms." High magnitude RPEs indicated a change in the underlying distribution of rewards. To test whether these large RPEs created a new latent context, we first assessed recognition priming for sequential pairs that contained or did not contain a high-RPE event, as well as out-of-sequence pairs (Exp. 1: n=27 & Exp. 2: n=83). We found evidence of recognition priming for both sequential pair types, including the pair with the high-RPE event, indicating that the high-RPE event is bound to its predecessor in memory. Given that high-RPE events are themselves preferentially remembered (Rouhani et al, 2018), we next tested recognition priming for pairs that had one item in between them (i.e. the pairs were either across a high-RPE event or not), where none of the tested items were high-RPE items (Exp. 3: n=85). Here, sequential pairs across a high-RPE no longer showed recognition priming whereas pairs within the same latent reward state did, providing initial evidence for an RPE-modulated event boundary. We then investigated whether RPE event boundaries disrupt temporal memory of those events (Exp. 4). After reward learning, we asked participants to order and estimate the distance between two events that had either included a high-RPE event between them, or not. We found (n=49) and replicated (n=77) worse sequence memory for events across a high-RPE event. Altogether, these findings demonstrate that high-RPE events are both more strongly encoded and act as event boundaries that interrupt the sequential integration of events. We captured these effects in a variant of the Context Maintenance and Retrieval model (CMR; Polyn, Norman & Kahana, 2009), modified to incorporate RPEs into the encoding process.

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Section: Updating Temporal Context and Associative Matrices During Resupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: High Rpes Form Event Boundaries In Memorymentioning

confidence: 92%

Reward prediction errors create event boundaries in memory

et al. 2020

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“…Likewise, item pairs are also remembered as having occurred farther apart in time if they spanned an event boundary compared to items that had been encountered in the same context 1,4,18 . Event boundaries can also influence nontemporal aspects of episodic memory, such as enhancing associative memory for an item and any co-incident contextual information (e.g., background color 16,20 ). The existing literature therefore presents a complex story, whereby temporal aspects of episodic memory integration are disrupted by changes in the surrounding context, while other elements of the new context present at event boundaries are enhanced in memory.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pupil-linked arousal signals track the temporal organization of events in memory

2020

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Everyday life unfolds continuously, yet we tend to remember past experiences as discrete event sequences or episodes. Although this phenomenon has been well documented, the neuromechanisms that support the transformation of continuous experience into distinct and memorable episodes remain unknown. Here, we show that changes in context, or event boundaries, elicit a burst of autonomic arousal, as indexed by pupil dilation. Event boundaries also lead to the segmentation of adjacent episodes in later memory, evidenced by changes in memory for the temporal duration, order, and perceptual details of recent event sequences. These subjective and objective changes in temporal memory are also related to distinct temporal features of pupil dilations to boundaries as well as to the temporal stability of more prolonged pupil-linked arousal states. Collectively, our findings suggest that pupil measures reflect both stability and change in ongoing mental context representations, which in turn shape the temporal structure of memory.

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“…In contrast, when the task is markedly item-focused, the Distinctiveness Approach trumps the Shared Context Approach 8 . This was the case in a recent study 41 , which found that distinctiveness enhances item's source memory of color. These diverging findings emphasize the importance of task demands in determining the reliance on shared context or temporal distinctiveness in supporting sequence memory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Explicit Sequence Memory in Recall of Temporally-structured Episodes

Stern

Katz

Sadeh

2020

Sci Rep

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The order in which events unfold over time is an important scaffold aiding recollection. This study asks whether explicit order memory is enhanced for items sharing similar internally-driven temporal contexts. To tap internally-driven temporal context, we capitalized on the Temporal Contiguity Effect whereby recollection of one item promotes recall of adjacently-encoded items. We compared pairs encoded and retrieved contiguously (cont-enc-ret), whose items share internally-driven temporal contexts, to pairs retrieved, but not encoded, contiguously (cont-ret) and to pairs encoded, but not retrieved, contiguously (cont-enc). Cont-enc-ret pairs exhibited superior relative order over cont-ret pairs, supporting accounts emphasizing shared temporal context as opposed to temporal distinctiveness in driving sequence memory. No difference was found in absolute order between the pair types, in line with theories suggesting a dissociation between relative and absolute order. Additionally, cont-enc-ret and cont-enc pairs exhibited equivalent relative order, supporting the role of encoding as opposed to retrieval in the enhancement of relative order. Finally, cont-enc-ret pairs were perceived as closer than cont-enc pairs, supporting the claim that cont-enc-ret pairs constitute part of a temporallycoherent episode. Together, these results implicate internally-driven temporal context in the formation of temporally-structured episodes that enhances sequence memory of the items within the episode. When we remember an episode from our past, we do not merely recollect its details in random order, rather the sequence in which the episode unfolded over time provides an important scaffold for recollection. Recalling one item brings to mind other items that occurred adjacently in time 1,2. In the absence of such a temporal structure, an episode would amount to no more than a random list of details. 'Mental time travel' , the ability to re-experience past episodes 3,4 and the ability to simulate future episodes using past events as templates 5 both rely on the coherence provided by recollection of sequence memory 6. Furthermore, the order of events often defines the meaning and significance that we attribute to them 7. For example, the ability to infer a causal relation between two events, requires remembering that the cause preceded the effect 2. Thus, explicit sequence memory plays an important role in constructing a coherent representation of one's past experiences. Past studies have found enhanced sequence memory 8 and an increase in the perceived proximity 9 between items sharing the same experimentally-manipulated context. Inspired by these findings, the focus of the current study is on the role of internally-driven temporal context and its effects on different types of sequence memory. Internally-driven temporal context is best manifested by the seminal Temporal Contiguity Effect (TCE) in free recall paradigms. This effect pertains to the tendency to contiguously recall items that were temporally proximal during the study phase ...

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A context-change account of temporal distinctiveness

Cited by 25 publications

References 81 publications

Reward prediction errors create event boundaries in memory

Reward prediction errors create event boundaries in memory

Pupil-linked arousal signals track the temporal organization of events in memory

Explicit Sequence Memory in Recall of Temporally-structured Episodes

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