Memory in pregnancy and post‐partum: Item specific and relational encoding processes in recall and recognition

Abstract

It has been recently proposed that pregnant women would perform memory tasks by focusing more on item-specific processes and less on relational processing, compared to post-partum women (Mickes, Wixted, Shapiro & Scarff, ). The present cross-sectional study tested this hypothesis by directly manipulating the type of encoding employed in the study phase. Pregnant, post-partum and control women either rated the pleasantness of word meaning (which induced item-specific elaboration) or named the semantic category to which they belonged (which induced relational elaboration). Memory for the encoded words was later tested in free recall (which emphasizes relational processing) and in recognition (which emphasizes item-specific processing). In line with Mickes et al.'s () conclusions, pregnant women in the item-specific condition performed worse than post-partum women in the relational condition in free recall, but not in recognition. However, compared to the other two groups, pregnant women also exhibited lower recognition accuracy in the item-specific condition. Overall, these results confirm that pregnant women rely on relational encoding less than post-partum women, but additionally suggest that the former group might use item-specific processes less efficiently than post-partum and control women.

Explicit and implicit conceptual memory in pregnancy and postpartum: A cross-sectional study investigating the use of item-specific and relational encoding processes.

“…Most important for the present purposes, we found that control women exhibited a strong recall advantage for small categories (thus replicating the results reported by Mulligan, 2012), whereas the performance of pregnant and postpartum women was not affected by the manipulation of category size. This result appears to be inconsistent with the hypothesis that pregnancy would be associated with an enhanced focus on the item-specific properties of the studied exemplars (Mickes et al, 2009); rather, it suggests that the use of itemspecific encoding processes was less efficient during pregnancy (Spataro et al, 2016). Turning to the more specific comparison between pregnant and postpartum women, the predicted advantage in the recall of exemplars from large categories was not obtained, although the inspection of Figure 1 indicates that the means were in the correct direction (i.e., the proportions of exemplars recalled from large categories were numerically larger for postpartum than for pregnant women).…”

“…Put in other words, the small category-size condition stimulated the use of item-specific encoding processes, whereas the large category-size condition stimulated the use of relational encoding processes. From this perspective, the findings obtained in Experiment 1 might potentially suggest that pregnant women were less efficient in the use of item-specific encoding processes (Spataro et al, 2016), as they: a) failed to show the predicted advantage in the recall of small-category exemplars (that was instead exhibited by control women); and b) recalled less exemplars than control women in the small category-size condition, in which the contribution of item-specific processes should have been maximized (Mulligan, 2006, 2012).…”

“…Thus, pregnancy was associated with a less efficient use of organizational strategies. However, Spataro et al (2016) also found that the recognition performance of pregnant women in the item-specific encoding condition was significantly worse than that of postpartum and control women. Thus, in this study pregnancy was not associated with a more efficient use of item-specific processes; if anything, pregnancy produced a generalized decrease in memory which extended to both item-specific and relational encoding processes.…”

“…Regarding category exemplar generation, we expected pregnant women to exhibit a reduced advantage for large categories, as these women should use relational encoding processes less efficiently than control women (Anderson & Rutherford, 2012; Mickes et al, 2009). On the other hand, if pregnancy is associated with a generalised impairment in the use of item-specific and relational encoding processing (as implied by the results reported by Spataro et al, 2016), then we should expect pregnant women to show a performance different from that of control women in both the category cued recall and category exemplar generation tasks. That is, both the advantage of small categories in category cued recall and the advantage of large categories in category exemplar generation should be reduced during pregnancy.…”

“…Thus, pregnant women appeared to perform the two types of memory tasks by relying more heavily on item-specific encoding processes, at the expense of relational processes: this tendency conferred an advantage in the recognition of previously studied stimuli (because an efficient performance in this task is favored by the focus on the distinctive properties of individual items), but simultaneously reduced the women’s performance in free recall (because an efficient performance in this task is favored by the focus on interitem categorical relationships). To examine this hypothesis in more details, Spataro et al (2016) directly manipulated the type of encoding processes used by participants during the study phase. Pregnant, postpartum, and control women tried to remember a list of words by either rating their pleasantness (a procedure that encouraged item-specific processing) or by naming the corresponding semantic category (a procedure that encouraged relational processing; Einstein & Hunt, 1980; Hunt & Einstein, 1981).…”