Precise instructions determine participants’ memory search strategy in judgments of relative order in short lists

Chan, Michelle; Roß, Bernhard; Earle, Guy; Caplan, Jeremy B.

doi:10.3758/pbr.16.5.945

Cited by 20 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Perhaps performance in judgment of recency tasks requires detailed examination of the present state rather than recovery of a past state. Perhaps the ability to scan through current and recovered memory states (Hacker, 1980; Chan, Ross, Earle, & Caplan, 2009) depends critically on subregions of the PFC.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ensembles of human MTL neurons “jump back in time” in response to a repeated stimulus

et al. 2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Episodic memory, which depends critically on the integrity of the medial temporal lobe (MTL), has been described as “mental time travel” in which the rememberer “jumps back in time.” The neural mechanism underlying this ability remains elusive. Mathematical and computational models of performance in episodic memory tasks provide a specific hypothesis regarding the computation that supports such a jump back in time. The models suggest that a representation of temporal context, a representation that changes gradually over macroscopic periods of time, is the cue for episodic recall. According to these models, a jump back in time corresponds to a stimulus recovering a prior state of temporal context. In vivo single-neuron recordings were taken from the human MTL while epilepsy patients distinguished novel from repeated images in a continuous recognition memory task. The firing pattern of the ensemble of MTL neurons showed robust temporal autocorrelation over macroscopic periods of time during performance of the memory task. The gradually-changing part of the ensemble state was causally affected by the visual stimulus being presented. Critically, repetition of a stimulus caused the ensemble to elicit a pattern of activity that resembled the pattern of activity present before the initial presentation of the stimulus. These findings confirm a direct prediction of this class of temporal context models and may be a signature of the mechanism that underlies the experience of episodic memory as mental time travel.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ensembles of human MTL neurons “jump back in time” in response to a repeated stimulus

et al. 2012

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A study by Chan et al (2009) challenges the idea that backward scanning is obligatory in such experiments. Some of their subjects were instructed to indicate which of the test probes occurred later in the list (a recency judgment), and others were instructed to indicate which probe occurred earlier in the list.…”

Section: Empirical Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Contrary to that idea, reaction times in the Earlier condition were generally faster than those in the Later condition, suggesting that, if anything, forward scanning may be more natural. Chan et al (2009) concluded that a subtle difference in instructions can bias memory scanning in either direction. However, this conclusion again ignores the prospective nature of the experiments.…”

Section: Empirical Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Is memory organized by temporal contiguity?

Hintzman

2015

Mem Cogn

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The hypotheses that memories are ordered according to time and that contiguity is central to learning have recently reemerged in the human memory literature. This article reviews some of the key empirical findings behind this revival and some of the evidence against it, and finds the evidence for temporal organization unconvincing. A central problem is that, as many memory experiments are done, they have a prospective, as well as a retrospective, component. That is, if subjects can anticipate how they will be tested, they encode the to-be-remembered material in a way that they believe will facilitate performance on the anticipated test. Experiments that avoid this confounding factor have shown little or no evidence of organization by contiguity.

show abstract

“…Similarly, the minimal dependence of judged recency on previous presentations of a stimulus (Hintzman, 2010) is a natural consequence of a backward self-terminating model. The forward scanning results (Chan et al, 2009;Liu et al, 2014) could result from recovery of the temporal context at the start of the list (Davelaar, Goshen-Gottstein, Ashkenazi, Haarmann, & Usher, 2005) followed by a forward scan using a translation operator (Shankar, Singh, & Howard, 2016). The major gap in reconciling short-term (this study, Muter, 1979;Hacker, 1980;Hockley, 1984;McElree & Dosher, 1993) and long-term (Hinrichs & Buschke, 1968;Hintzman, 2010;Yntema & Trask, 1963) JORs is the lack of RT data for judgments over scales more than a few seconds.…”

Section: A Common Model For Jors Across Scales?mentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Additional evidence suggesting that scanning is under strategic control comes from a variant on the relative JOR task in which the instructions are reversed. Chan, Ross, Earle, and Caplan (2009) had participants perform either a JOR task or a relative order judgment in which they were asked to select the probe stimulus that appeared earlier in the list. Unsurprisingly, their JOR task replicated the canonical results from relative JOR, with correct RTs failing to show an e↵ect of the lag to the less recent probe, consistent with a backward self-terminating scanning model.…”

Section: Is Scanning Under Strategic Control?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recency order judgments in short term memory: Replication and extension of Hacker (1980)

Singh

2017

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The classic finding from short-term relative JOR tasks is that correct response time (RT) depends on the lag to the more recent item but not to the less recent item (Hacker, 1980). For decades, researchers have argued that this finding is consistent with a self-terminating backward scanning model (Muter, 1979;Hacker, 1980;Hockley, 1984;McElree & Dosher, 1993). This finding has taken on new importance in light of recent proposal that many forms of memory depend on a compressed representation of the past (Howard, Shankar, Aue, & Criss, 2015). This paper replicates and extends the results of the classic papers. A Bayesian t-test showed substantial evidence for the null e↵ect of lag to the less recent item on correct RT. In addition, this paper reports that correct RT is a sub-linear function of lag to the more recent probe and replicates the classic finding that error RT depends on lag to the less recent probe. These findings place new constraints on models of short-term memory scanning.In a relative judgment of recency (JOR) task participants choose which of two probes from a list was presented more recently. Recency in this task is traditionally measured in units of lag, which is the number of time steps in the past at which the probe was presented. That is, if the last item in the list was presented as a probe, it would be associated with a lag of one. The classic finding from short-term relative JOR tasks is that correct response time (RT) depends on the lag to the more recent item but not to the less recent item (see Fig. 1, Muter, 1979;Hacker, 1980;Hockley, 1984). For decades, researchers have argued that this finding is consistent with a self-terminating backward scan (Muter, 1979;Hacker, 1980;Hockley, 1984;McElree & Dosher, 1993). Because the scan starts at the present and proceeds backwards in time, RTs show a recency e↵ect. Because the scan is self-terminating this naturally accounts for the finding that correct RTs do not depend on the lag of the less-

show abstract

Precise instructions determine participants’ memory search strategy in judgments of relative order in short lists

Cited by 20 publications

References 17 publications

Ensembles of human MTL neurons “jump back in time” in response to a repeated stimulus

Ensembles of human MTL neurons “jump back in time” in response to a repeated stimulus

Is memory organized by temporal contiguity?

Recency order judgments in short term memory: Replication and extension of Hacker (1980)

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About