Fragile associations coexist with robust memories for precise details in long-term memory.

Lew, Timothy; Pashler, Harold; Vul, Edward

doi:10.1037/xlm0000178

Cited by 14 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Such a view of forgetting is consistent, at least in part, with the concept of WM as active binding of visual features (Treisman & Zhang, 2006; Wheeler & Treisman, 2002) and extends findings that report the strong effect of delay interval on object-location binding across a few seconds (Pertzov, Dong, Peich, & Husain, 2012) and days (Lew, Pashler, & Vul, 2016). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Rapid forgetting results from competition over time between items in visual working memory.

Pertzov¹,

Manohar²,

Husain³

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Working memory is now established as a fundamental cognitive process across a range of species. Loss of information held in working memory has the potential to disrupt many aspects of cognitive function. However, despite its significance, the mechanisms underlying rapid forgetting remain unclear, with intense recent debate as to whether it is interference between stored items that leads to loss of information or simply temporal decay. Here we show that both factors are essential and interact in a highly specific manner. Although a single item can be maintained in memory with high fidelity, multiple items compete in working memory, progressively degrading each other’s representations as time passes. Specifically, interaction between items is associated with both worsening precision and increased reporting errors of object features over time. Importantly, during the period of maintenance, although items are no longer visible, maintenance resources can be selectively redeployed to protect the probability to recall the correct feature and the precision with which cued items can be recalled, as if it was the only item in memory. These findings reveal that the biased competition concept could be applied not only to perceptual processes but also to active maintenance of working memory representations over time.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Rapid forgetting results from competition over time between items in visual working memory.

Pertzov¹,

Manohar²,

Husain³

2017

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…Thus, by lag 10+ it is possible that the memory trace (color) is present, but the association to the cue is difficult to retrieve as a result of studying other target-cue combinations. Such an interference explanation is consistent with a fragile association account of memory (Lew et al, 2015), where recall is thought to be a combination of remembered information, misassociated information (incorrectly binding targets to cues), and guessing.…”

Section: Interference Vs Decaymentioning

confidence: 64%

“…A natural task with a stronger cue-target association might result in a substantially different pattern of data -one where the rate of guessing is lower. Recent work by Lew, Pashler, and Vul (2015) proposes an interesting new model of fragile associations in LTM. While this is beyond the scope of this paper, given that we cannot assess fragile associations in the current experimental paradigm, we agree that this is an important future direction.…”

Section: Fragile Associationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The dynamics of fidelity over the time course of long-term memory

Persaud

Hemmer

2016

Cognitive Psychology

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Bayesian models of cognition assume that prior knowledge about the world influences judgments. Recent approaches have suggested that the loss of fidelity from working to long-term (LT) memory is simply due to an increased rate of guessing (e.g. Brady, Konkle, Gill, Oliva, & Alvarez, 2013). That is, recall is the result of either remembering (with some noise) or guessing. This stands in contrast to Bayesian models of cognition while assume that prior knowledge about the world influences judgments, and that recall is a combination of expectations learned from the environment and noisy memory representations. Here, we evaluate the time course of fidelity in LT episodic memory, and the relative contribution of prior category knowledge and guessing, using a continuous recall paradigm. At an aggregate level, performance reflects a high rate of guessing. However, when aggregate data is partitioned by lag (i.e., the number of presentations from study to test), or is un-aggregated, performance appears to be more complex than just remembering with some noise and guessing. We implemented three models: the standard remember-guess model, a three-component remember-guess model, and a Bayesian mixture model and evaluated these models against the data. The results emphasize the importance of taking into account the influence of prior category knowledge on memory.

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“…Posterior means and 95% credible intervals. As we mentioned in the Introduction, an additional potential source of error may be that participants erroneously recall the location associated with another studied object that is not the cue (see Bays et al, 2009;Lew et al, 2016;Pertzov et al, 2015). Given the continuous presentation of stimuli in this task, there are numerous potential non-target locations for mis-binding responses.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

Rhodes¹,

Abbene²,

Meierhofer³

et al. 2020

Psychology and Aging

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Age differences are well established for many memory tasks assessing both short-term and long-term memory. However, how age differences in performance vary with increasing delay between study and test is less clear. Here we report two experiments in which participants studied a continuous sequence of object-location pairings. Test events were intermixed such that participants were asked to recall the precise location of an object following a variable delay. Older adults exhibit a greater degree of error (distance between studied and recalled locations) relative to younger adults at short (0-2 intervening events) and longer delays (10-25 intervening events). Mixture modeling of the distribution of recall error suggests that older adults do not fail to recall information at a significantly higher rate than younger adults. Instead, what they do recall appears to be less precise. Follow up analyses demonstrate that this age difference emerges following only one or two intervening events between study and test. These findings are consistent with the suggestion that aging does not greatly impair recall from the focus of attention but age differences emerge once information is displaced from this highly accessible state. Further, we suggest that age differences in the precision of memory, but not the probability of successful recall, may be due to the use of more gist-like representations in this task.

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Fragile associations coexist with robust memories for precise details in long-term memory.

Cited by 14 publications

References 38 publications

Rapid forgetting results from competition over time between items in visual working memory.

Rapid forgetting results from competition over time between items in visual working memory.

The dynamics of fidelity over the time course of long-term memory

Age differences in the precision of memory at short and long delays.

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