Refresh my memory: Episodic memory reinstatements intrude on working memory maintenance

Abstract

A fundamental question in memory research is how different forms of memory interact. Previous research has shown that people rely on working memory (WM) in short-term recognition tasks; a common view is that episodic memory (EM) only influences performance on these tasks when WM maintenance is disrupted. However, retrieval of memories from EM has been widely observed during brief periods of quiescence, raising the possibility that EM retrievals during maintenance—critically, before a response can be prepared—might affect short-term recognition memory performance even in the absence of distraction. We hypothesized that this influence would be mediated by the lingering presence of reactivated EM content in WM. We obtained support for this hypothesis in three experiments, showing that delay-period EM reactivation introduces incidentally associated information (context) into WM, and that these retrieved associations negatively impact subsequent recognition, leading to substitution errors (Experiment 1) and slowing of accurate responses (Experiment 2). FMRI pattern analysis showed that slowing is mediated by the content of EM reinstatement (Experiment 3). These results expose a previously hidden influence of EM on WM, raising new questions about the adaptive nature of their interaction.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13415-018-00674-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Object features reinstated from episodic memory guide attentional selection

“…While automatic reinstatement of object attributes in VWM may make visual search more efficient, automatic reinstatement is unlikely to be a search-specific mechanism. Rather, it is consistent with previous studies from the memory literature showing that irrelevant object attributes are automatically recalled (Bornstein & Norman, 2017;Ecker, Maybery, & Zimmer, 2013;Geukes, Vorberg, & Zwitserlood, 2019;Hoskin, Bornstein, Norman, & Cohen, 2019;Hyun, Woodman, Vogel, Hollingworth, & Luck, 2009;Shen, Tang, Wu, Shui, & Gao, 2013;Yin et al, 2012). For instance, Ecker et al (2013) askedparticipants to store geometrical shapes in VWM.…”

Awake Reactivation of Prior Experiences Consolidates Memories and Biases Cognition

“…Thus, exposure to emotional stimuli biased the way in which new and distinctive information was subsequently encoded into memory and later remembered. Relatedly, other recent studies have found that incidental reminder cues can reactivate neural representations of prior contexts and thus bias subsequent decision making [108][109][110]. In future work, it will be interesting to more broadly examine how memory reactivation influences the way in which new information is experienced, processed, and acted upon.…”

Structuring Memory Through Inference‐Based Event Segmentation

“…This benefit may be driven by recent activation of a sentence that could prime retrieval of other episodes in the same event. One study that supports incidental retrieval of within‐event items used a subset of a previously studied group of words as a target for an unrelated memory task, and showed that a lure from the same group was more likely to be falsely recognized than a lure from a different group (Hoskin, Bornstein, Norman, & Cohen, 2018). While this demonstrates that it can come at a cost at times, having segmented structure in memory can keep related information together, facilitating later retrieval.…”