Memory Guides the Comprehension of Event Changes for Older and Younger Adults

Wahlheim, Christopher N.; Zacks, Jeffrey M.

doi:10.1101/201939

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Overall, we propose that relatedness increases the likelihood of recursive reminders, which create well-fortified and interdependent sets of associations that maintain and even strengthen memories while preserving information such as their temporal and contextual order (69,79,96). These explanations rely heavily on the importance of interdependencies among base and secondary pairs, a concept elucidated by paradigms featuring multi-element "closed- Finally, under ΔTarget learning, testing causes subjects to recollect stimulus changes more often than restudying (80).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Semantic relatedness retroactively boosts memory and promotes memory interdependence across episodes

Antony¹,

Romero²,

Vierra³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Two fundamental issues in memory research concern when later experiences strengthen or weaken initial memories and when the two memories become linked or remain independent. A promising candidate for explaining these issues is semantic relatedness. Here, across five paired associate learning experiments (N=1000), we systematically varied the semantic relatedness between initial and later cues, initial and later targets, or both. We found that learning retroactively benefited long-term memory performance for semantically related words (versus unshown control words), and these benefits increased as a function of relatedness. Critically, memory dependence between initial and later pairs also increased with relatedness, suggesting that pre-existing semantic relationships interdependence for memories formed across episodes. We also found that modest retroactive benefits, but not interdependencies, emerged when subjects learned via studying rather than practice testing. These findings demonstrate that semantic relatedness during new learning retroactively strengthens old associations while scaffolding new ones into well-fortified memory traces.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Semantic relatedness retroactively boosts memory and promotes memory interdependence across episodes

Antony¹,

Romero²,

Vierra³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…The full stimulus sets for the materials used in the present experiments (i.e., movies of the actor performing everyday activities and cued recall questions), anonymized data files, data with coded responses, and analysis scripts can be downloaded from https://osf.io/t2qjk/ (Wahlheim & Zacks, 2017, October 4). The research reported here was approved by the Institutional Review Boards of Washington University in St. Louis (Experiments 1 and 2) and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (Experiment 2).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory guides the processing of event changes for older and younger adults.

Wahlheim¹,

Zacks²

2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Memory for related past experiences can guide current perceptions. However, memory can lead one astray if situational features have changed. Thus, to adaptively use memory to guide perception, one needs to retrieve relevant memories and also to register differences between remembered and current events. Event Memory Retrieval and Comparison Theory proposes that observers associatively activate memories of related previous episodes, and that this guides their ongoing perception. Conflicts between previous and current event features can hurt immediate performance, but if changes are registered and encoded they can lead to highly effective encoding of the prior event, current event, and their relationship. Disruption of these mechanisms could play a role in older adults' greater susceptibility to event memory interference. Two experiments tested these hypotheses by asking participants to watch movies depicting two fictive days of an actor. Some activities were repeated across days, others were repeated with a changed feature (e.g., or a), and others were performed only on Day 2. One week after watching the Day 2 movie, participants completed a cued-recall test. Changes that participants detected but did not remember led to proactive interference in recall, but changes that were successfully detected and remembered led to Younger adults detected and remembered more changes than older adults, which partly explained older adults' differential memory deficit for changed activities. These findings suggest a role for episodic reminding in event perception and a potential source of age differences in event memory. (PsycINFO Database Record

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“…Those that fail to notice and recollect the change across lists show the classic pattern of proactive interference (Wahlheim & Jacoby, 2013). We and our collaborators are currently investigating how these mechanisms play out in the perception and memory of everyday events (Wahlheim, Zacks, & Eisenberg, 2016).…”

Section: Cognitive Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%