Memory & Cognition最新文献

Working- and long-term memory are often studied in isolation. To better understand the specific limitations of working memory, effort is made to reduce the potential influence of long-term memory on performance in working memory tasks (e.g., asking participants to remember artificial, abstract items rather than familiar real-world objects). However, in everyday life we use working- and long-term memory in tandem. Here, our goal was to characterize how long-term memory can be recruited to circumvent capacity limits in a typical visual working memory task (i.e., remembering colored squares). Prior work has shown that incidental repetitions of working memory arrays often do not improve visual working memory performance - even after dozens of incidental repetitions, working memory performance often shows no improvement for repeated arrays. Here, we used a whole-report working memory task with explicit rather than incidental repetitions of arrays. In contrast to prior work with incidental repetitions, in two behavioral experiments we found that explicit repetitions of arrays yielded robust improvement to working memory performance, even after a single repetition. Participants performed above chance at recognizing repeated arrays in a later long-term memory test, consistent with the idea that long-term memory was used to rapidly improve performance across array repetitions. Finally, we analyzed inter-item response times and we found a response time signature of chunk formation that only emerged after the array was repeated (inter-response time slowing after two to three items); thus, inter-item response times may be useful for examining the coordinated interaction of visual working and long-term memory in future work.

Memories are pliable and can be biased by post-encoding information. In targeted memory reactivation (TMR) studies, participants encode information then sleep, during which time sounds or scents that were previously associated with the encoded images are re-presented in an effort to trigger reactivation of the associated memory traces. Upon subsequent testing, memory for reactivated items is often enhanced. Is sleep essential for this process? The literature on awake TMR is small and findings are mixed. Here, we asked English-speaking adults to learn Japanese vocabulary words. During a subsequent active rest phase, participants played Tetris while sound cues associated with the vocabulary words were presented. Results showed that when memories were reactivated, they were either disrupted (Experiment 1) or unaffected (Experiments 2, 3). These findings indicate that awake TMR is not beneficial, and may actually impair subsequent memory. These findings have important implications for research on memory consolidation and reactivation.

Models of recognition memory often assume that decisions are made independently from each other. Yet there is growing evidence that consecutive recognition responses show sequential dependencies, whereby making one response increases the probability of repeating that response from one trial to the next trial. Across six experiments, we replicated this response-related carryover effect using word and nonword stimuli and further demonstrated that the content of the previous trial-both perceptual and conceptual-can also bias the response to the current test probe, with both perceptual (orthographic) and conceptual (semantic) similarity boosting the probability of consecutive "old" responses. Finally, a manipulation of attentional engagement in Experiments 3a and 3b provided little evidence these carryover effects on recognition decisions are merely a product of lapses in attention. Taken together, the current study reinforces prior findings that recognition decisions are not made independently, and that multiple forms of information perseverate across consecutive trials.

While abstractionist theories of visual word recognition propose that perceptual elements like font and letter case are filtered out during lexical access, instance-based theories allow for the possibility that these surface details influence this process. To disentangle these accounts, we focused on brand names embedded in logotypes. The consistent visual presentation of brand names may render them much more susceptible to perceptual factors than common words. In the present study, we compared original and modified brand logos, varying in font or letter case. In Experiment 1, participants decided whether the stimuli corresponded to existing brand names or not, regardless of graphical information. In Experiment 2, participants had to categorize existing brand names semantically - whether they corresponded to a brand in the transportation sector or not. Both experiments showed longer response times for the modified brand names, regardless of font or letter-case changes. These findings challenge the notion that only abstract units drive visual word recognition. Instead, they favor those models that assume that, under some circumstances, the traces in lexical memory may contain surface perceptual information.

Corrections to readers' misconceptions should result in higher belief when information sources are of high credibility. However, evaluations of credibility may be malleable, and we do not yet fully understand how changes to a source's credibility influence readers' credibility evaluations and knowledge revision outcomes. Thus, in two experiments, we examined how updating a source's credibility (Experiment 1: initially neutral sources later updated to be high-, low-, or neutral-credibility sources; Experiment 2: initially high- or low-credibility sources later updated to be low- or high-credibility sources) influenced knowledge revision and source credibility evaluations after readers engaged with refutation and non-refutation texts. Results showed that readers revised their credibility judgments from neutral-, high-, and low-credibility initial evaluations, indicating that source judgments are malleable rather than fixed. In addition, refutations from sources that are later revealed to be of high credibility can facilitate revision of both knowledge and initial source credibility evaluations.

Transformative experiences in an individual's life have a lasting impact on identity, belief system, and values. At the core of these experiences is the complex emotion of awe that promotes learning, making it worthwhile to study from an educational point of view. Drawing studies may provide a useful measure of awe in children-one that is more intuitive and attractive than questionnaires alone. Previous studies conducted with adults indicated that the diminished self, associated with transformative experiences, manifests in an actual decrease in size for figures representing the self in drawings. In the current study, self-representation was investigated in drawings of 10- to 12-year-old primary school children within the context of an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience that elicits the overview effect, known to lead to an intense apperception of awe. We did not replicate the adult findings regarding self-size in this younger age group. However, details and complexity in children's drawings appeared to be impacted by the awe-elicitation procedure in VR. These elements subsequently correlated to learning gains instead of the overview effect, indicating that this measure could be linked to cognitive ability. The findings of the current study contribute to a better understanding of how drawings reflect self-transcendental experiences; however, they also reveal that in younger age groups, they are not necessarily reflected in decreased self-size.

The attentional boost effect (ABE) and action-induced memory enhancement (AIME) suggest that memory performance for target-paired items is superior to that for distractor-paired items when participants performed a target detection task and a memory encoding task simultaneously. Though the memory enhancement has been well established, the temporal dynamics of how the target detection task influenced memory encoding remains unclear. To investigate this, we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between detection stimuli and the words to be memorized using a remember/know study-test paradigm, and we focused primarily on memory performance for the words that appeared after the detection response. The results showed that target-paired memory enhancement was robust from SOA = 0 s to SOA = 0.75 s, but was not significant when examined by itself in Experiment 1A or weakened in Experiment 2 and the conjoint analysis when SOA = 1 s, which were only observed in R responses. The post-response memory enhancement still existed when there was no temporal overlap between the word and target, similar to the magnitude of memory enhancement observed with temporal overlap. These results supported the view that target-paired memory enhancement (recollection rather than familiarity) occurred irrespective of whether the items appeared simultaneously with the targets or within a short period after the response, and the temporal overlap of the word and target was not necessary for post-response memory enhancement.

The long-term fate of to-be-remembered information depends in part on the conditions of initial learning, including mental operations engaged via working memory. However, the mechanistic role of working memory (WM) processes in subsequent episodic memory (EM) remains unclear. Does re-exposure to word-pairs during WM recognition testing improve EM for those associations? Are benefits from WM re-exposure greater after an opportunity for retrieval practice compared to mere re-exposure to the memoranda? These questions are addressed in three experiments (N = 460) designed to assess whether WM-based recognition testing benefits long-term associative memory relative to WM-based restudying. Our results show null or negative benefits of WM recognition testing minutes later when initial WM accuracy was not considered. An EM benefit of WM recognition testing only emerges when the analyses are limited to pairs responded to correctly during WM. However, even when compared with accurate WM recognition, restudying can lead to similar associative EM benefits in specific experimental conditions. Taken together, the present results suggest that while WM re-exposure to studied pairs is beneficial to long-term associative memory, successful retrieval on initial tests may be a necessary but insufficient condition for the emergence of a "WM-based testing effect." We consider these results in relation to several hypotheses proposed to explain the testing effect in long-term memory (LTM). In view of empirical parallels with the LTM testing effect, we propose that similar processes influence the benefits of practice tests administered within the canonical boundaries of WM, suggesting continuities in memory over the short and long term.