scholarly journals Tracing the path of forgetting in rule abstraction and exemplar retrieval

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (11) ◽  
pp. 2261-2281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janina A Hoffmann ◽  
Bettina von Helversen ◽  
Regina A Weilbächer ◽  
Jörg Rieskamp

People often forget acquired knowledge over time such as names of former classmates. Which knowledge people can access, however, may modify the judgement process and affect judgement accuracy. Specifically, we hypothesised that judgements based on retrieving past exemplars from long-term memory may be more vulnerable to forgetting than remembering rules that relate the cues to the criterion. Experiment 1 systematically tracked the individual course of forgetting from initial learning to later tests (immediate, 1 day, and 1 week) in a linear judgement task facilitating rule-based strategies and a multiplicative judgement task facilitating exemplar-based strategies. Practising the acquired judgement strategy in repeated tests helped participants to consistently apply the learnt judgement strategy and retain a high judgement accuracy even after a week. Yet, whereas a long retention interval did not affect judgements in the linear task, a long retention interval impaired judgements in the multiplicative task. If practice was restricted as in Experiment 2, judgement accuracy suffered in both tasks. In addition, after a week without practice, participants tried to reconstruct their judgements by applying rules in the multiplicative task. These results emphasise that the extent to which decision makers can still retrieve previously learned knowledge limits their ability to make accurate judgements and that the preferred strategies change over time if the opportunity for practice is limited.

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith A. Hudson

Abstract This study examined mother-child conversation about past events as a context in which children acquire the discourse skills for talking about the past and develop the ability to recall past events. Conversations about past events were recorded in one mother-child dyad from 20 to 28 months. Analyses focused on changes in the structure and content of the conversation over time as well as on the effects of retention interval on long-term memory. In addition, effects of repeated memory conversations about the same events were examined. Over time, the child was more active in participating in and then initiating conversa-tions about the past. Her contributions also became more evaluative with age. Repeated memory conversations did not affect the child's recall of the particular events that had been previously discussed, but over the 8 months she was able to recall more about events in general. These results suggest that early autobio-graphical memory development involves learning how to remember, not what to remember; the skills for retrieving and talking about memories emerge, but the specific content of repeatedly recalled events varies over retelling. (Psychology)


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (S1) ◽  
pp. S412-S412
Author(s):  
V. Giannouli

IntroductionThere is a hypothesis in cognitive psychology that long-term memory retrieval is improved by intermediate testing than by restudying the information. The effect of testing has been investigated with the use of a variety of stimuli. However, almost all testing effect studies to date have used purely verbal materials such as word pairs, facts and prose passages.ObjectiveHere byzantine music symbol–word pairs were used as to-be-learned materials to demonstrate the generalisability of the testing effect to symbol learning in participants with and without depressive symptoms.MethodFifty healthy (24 women, M age = 26.20, SD = 5.64) and forty volunteers with high depressive symptomatology (20 women, M age = 27.00, SD = 1.04) were examined. The participants did not have a music education. The examination material was completely new for them: 16 byzantine music notation stimuli, paired with a verbal label (the ancient Greek name of the symbol). Half of the participants underwent intermediate testing and the others restudied the information in a balanced design.ResultsResults indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in final memory test performance after a retention interval of 5 minutes for both groups of participants with low and high level depressive symptomatology (P > 0.005). After a retention interval of a week, tested pairs were retained better than repeatedly studied pairs for high and low depressive symptomatology groups (P < 0.005).ConclusionsThis research suggests that the effect of testing time on later memory retrieval can also be obtained in byzantine symbol learning.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


2009 ◽  
pp. 465-482
Author(s):  
Christof van Nimwegen ◽  
Hermina Tabachneck-Schijf ◽  
Herre van Oostendorp

How can we design technology that suits human cognitive needs? In this chapter, we review research on the effects of externalizing information on the interface versus requiring people to internalize it. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of externalizing information. Further, we discuss some of our own research investigating how externalizing or not externalizing information in program interfaces influences problem-solving performance. In general, externalization provides information relevant to immediate task execution visibly or audibly in the interface. Thus, remembering certain task-related knowledge becomes unnecessary, which relieves working memory. Examples are visual feedback aids such as “graying out” nonapplicable menu items. On the contrary, when certain needed task-related information is not externalized on the interface, it needs to be internalized, stored in working memory and long-term memory. In many task situations, having the user acquire more knowledge of the structure of the task or its underlying rules is desirable. We examined the hypothesis that while externalization will yield better performance during initial learning, internalization will yield a better performance later. We furthermore expected internalization to result in better knowledge, and expected it to provoke less trial-and-error behavior. We conducted an experiment where we compared an interface with certain information externalized versus not externalizing it, and measured performance and knowledge. In a second session 8 months later, we investigated what was left of the participants’ knowledge and skills, and presented them with a transfer task. The results showed that requiring internalization can yield advantages over having all information immediately at hand. This shows that using cognitive findings to enhance the effectiveness of software (especially software with specific purposes) can make a valuable contribution to the field of human-computer interaction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 607-613
Author(s):  
Kathleen B. McDermott ◽  
Christopher L. Zerr

Most research on long-term memory uses an experimental approach whereby participants are assigned to different conditions, and condition means are the measures of interest. This approach has demonstrated repeatedly that conditions that slow the rate of learning tend to improve later retention. A neglected question is whether aggregate findings at the level of the group (i.e., slower learning tends to improve retention) translate to the level of individual people. We identify a discrepancy whereby—across people—slower learning tends to coincide with poorer memory. The positive relation between learning rate (speed of learning) and retention (amount remembered after a delay) across people is referred to as learning efficiency. A more efficient learner can acquire information faster and remember more of it over time. We discuss potential characteristics of efficient learners and consider future directions for research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 200 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Meagher ◽  
Dimitrios Adamis ◽  
Paula Trzepacz ◽  
Maeve Leonard

BackgroundLongitudinal studies of delirium phenomenology are lacking.AimsWe studied features that characterise subsyndromal delirium and persistent delirium over time.MethodTwice-weekly evaluations of 100 adults with DSM-IV delirium using the Delirium Rating Scale – Revised-98 (DRS-R98) and Cognitive Test for Delirium (CTD). The generalised estimating equation method identified symptom patterns distinguishing full syndromal from subsyndromal delirium and resolving from persistent delirium.ResultsParticipants (mean age 70.2 years (s.d. = 10.5)) underwent 323 assessments (range 2–9). Full syndromal delirium was significantly more severe than subsyndromal delirium for DRS-R98 thought process abnormalities, delusions, hallucinations, agitation, retardation, orientation, attention, and short- and long-term memory items, and CTD attention, vigilance, orientation and memory. Persistent full syndromal delirium had greater disturbance of DRS-R98 thought process abnormalities, delusions, agitation, orientation, attention, and short- and long-term memory items, and CTD attention, vigilance and orientation.ConclusionsFull syndromal delirium differs from subsyndromal delirium over time by greater severity of many cognitive and non-cognitive symptoms. Persistent delirium involves increasing prominence of recognised core diagnostic features and cognitive impairment.


2014 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa M.A. Clarin ◽  
Ivailo Borissov ◽  
Rachel A. Page ◽  
John M. Ratcliffe ◽  
Björn M. Siemers

Social learning describes information transfer between individuals through observation or direct interaction. Bats can live and forage in large groups, sometimes comprising several species, and are thus well suited for investigations of both intraspecific and interspecific information transfer. Although social learning has been documented within several bat species, it has not been shown to occur between species. Furthermore, it is not fully understood what level of interaction between individuals is necessary for social learning in bats. We address these questions by comparing the efficiency of observation versus interaction in intraspecific social learning and by considering interspecific social learning in sympatric bat species. Observers learned from demonstrators to identify food sources using a light cue. We show that intraspecific social learning exists in the greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis (Borkhausen, 1797)) and that direct interaction with a demonstrator more efficiently leads to information transfer than observational learning alone. We also found evidence for interspecific information transfer from M. myotis to the lesser mouse-eared bat (Myotis oxygnathus Monticelli, 1885). Additionally, we opportunistically retested one individual that we recaptured from the wild 1 year after initial learning and found long-term memory of the trained association. Our study adds to the understanding of learning, information transfer, and long-term memory in wild-living animals.


2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Rainey ◽  
Janet D. Larsen

In two experiments we tested the hypothesis that music, in the form of a familiar melody, can serve as an effective mnemonic device. Prior research has provided very little support for this commonly held belief. In both studies, participants learned a list of names that they heard either spoken or sung to a familiar tune. In Experiment 1, the melody was "Pop Goes the Weasel"; in Experiment 2, the melody was "Yankee Doodle." We measured the number of trials to learn the list initially and the number of trials to relearn the list a week later. In both studies, there was no advantage in initial learning for those who learned the names to the musical accompaniment. However,in both studies, participants who heard the sung version required fewer trials to relearn the list of names a week later than did participants who heard the spoken version.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Radhika Prosad Datta ◽  
Jayanta Kumar Seal ◽  
Jayanta Kumar Seal

This paper studies the long term memory of the returns from selected mutual funds from the large, mid & small cap and hybrid categories in India, over 10 years starting from 2008-09. The Hurst exponent is used to study the persistence and anti-persistent or mean-reverting trends and hence the market efficiency of the returns of the funds across various categories and periods are analyzed. The findings indicate, that there seems to be no significant difference in the market efficiency of various mutual funds across the categories studied over our period of interest. Although for certain periods all the categories do show persistent or anti-persistent behavior, there does not seem to be any particular pattern in such behaviour.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Forcato ◽  
Jens G. Klinzing ◽  
Julia Carbone ◽  
Michael Radloff ◽  
Frederik D. Weber ◽  
...  

AbstractReactivation by reminder cues labilizes memories during wakefulness, requiring reconsolidation to persist. In contrast, during sleep, cued reactivation seems to directly stabilize memories. In reconsolidation, incomplete reminders are more effective in reactivating memories than complete reminders by inducing a mismatch, i.e. a discrepancy between expected and actual events. Whether mismatch is likewise detected during sleep is unclear. Here we test whether cued reactivation during sleep is more effective for mismatch-inducing incomplete than complete reminders. We first establish that only incomplete but not complete reminders labilize memories during wakefulness. When complete or incomplete reminders are presented during 40-min sleep, both reminders are equally effective in stabilizing memories. However, when extending the retention interval for another 7 hours (following 40-min sleep), only incomplete but not complete reminders stabilize memories, regardless of the extension containing wakefulness or sleep. We propose that, during sleep, only incomplete reminders initiate long-term memory stabilization via mismatch detection.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jannik Luboeinski ◽  
Christian Tetzlaff

AbstractSynaptic tagging and capture (STC) is a molecular mechanism that accounts for the consolidation of synaptic changes induced by plasticity. To link this mechanism to long-term memory and thereby to the level of behavior, its dynamics on the level of recurrent networks have to be understood. To this end, we employ a biologically detailed neural network model of spiking neurons featuring STC, which models the learning and consolidation of long-term memory representations. Using this model, we investigate the effects of different organizational paradigms of multiple memory representations, and demonstrate a proof of principle for priming on long timescales. We examine these effects considering the spontaneous activation of memory representations as the network is driven by background noise. Our first finding is that the order in which the memory representations are learned significantly biases the likelihood of spontaneous activation towards more recently learned memory representations. Secondly, we find that hub-like structures counter this learning order effect for representations with less overlaps. We show that long-term depression is the mechanism underlying these findings, and that intermediate consolidation in between learning the individual representations strongly alters the described effects. Finally, we employ STC to demonstrate the priming of a long-term memory representation on a timescale of minutes to hours. As shown by these findings, our model provides a mechanistic synaptic and neuronal basis for known behavioral effects.


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