The nationality benefit: Long-term memory associations enhance visual working memory for color-shape conjunctions

Visual working memory (VWM) is typically found to be severely limited in capacity, but this limitation may be ameliorated by providing familiar objects that are associated with knowledge stored in long-term memory. However, comparing meaningful and meaningless stimuli usually entails a confound, because different types of objects also tend to vary in terms of their inherent perceptual complexity. The current study therefore aimed to dissociate stimulus complexity from object meaning in VWM. To this end, identical stimuli – namely, simple color-shape conjunctions – were presented, which either resembled meaningful configurations (“real” European flags), or which were rearranged to form perceptually identical but meaningless (“fake”) flags. The results revealed complexity estimates for “real” and “fake” flags to be higher than for unicolor baseline stimuli. However, VWM capacity for real flags was comparable to the unicolor baseline stimuli (and substantially higher than for fake flags). This shows that relatively complex, yet meaningful “real” flags reveal a VWM capacity that is comparable to rather simple, unicolored memory items. Moreover, this “nationality” benefit was related to individual flag recognition performance, thus showing that VWM depends on object knowledge.

Shifting Listening Niches: Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The term “listening niche” refers to the contexts in which people listen to music including what music they are listening to, with whom, when, where, and with what media. The first experiment investigates undergraduate students’ music listening niches in the initial COVID-19 lockdown period, 4 weeks immediately after the campus shut down abruptly. The second experiment explores how returning to a hybrid semester, the “new normal,” further affected these listening habits. In both experiments, the participants provided a list of their most frequently listened-to songs during the respective period of time. From these, they identified one song that seemed most associated with this period, their “signature song,” and stated why this song seemed relevant. These reasons were coded on nine underlying themes. Three clusters were found to underlie the themes: (1) emotional responses (2) memory associations, and (3) discovery of new music. We identified songs and reasons for selecting them that represented the three clusters and related these to the lyrical content. Compared to before the pandemic, participants in both experiments report listening more in general and on Spotify, but there were no differences in listening between lockdown and the new normal. Whom they were listening with shifted overtime from family members to significant others and finally to other friends and roommates. These results demonstrate how students listen to and find new music that is meaningful to them during this unprecedented pandemic.

Applying Self-Coding to the Measurement of Self-Generated Video Gaming and Gambling Memory Associations

Recently the use of implicit memory associations has expanded in the addiction literature to include the assessment of video gaming and gambling. However, the issue with memory associations lies in the open-ended nature of the answers that must be coded, which is often labour-intensive, costly, and where the ambiguity cannot always be resolved. The present study evaluates participant self-coding of memory associations versus researcher coding in the assessment of memory associations for video gaming and gambling. A sample of 3,176 Canadian adults were asked to produce responses to ten ambiguous words and ten potential behavioural associations for engagement in video gaming or gambling. Participants were subsequently asked to classify what categories their responses belonged to, including video gaming and gambling. Consistent with the literature on alcohol and marijuana memory associations, self-coded scores for video gaming and gambling were significantly higher than scores coded by the researchers, had significantly higher correlations with self-reported behaviours, and significantly improved the prediction of video gaming and gambling behaviours.Résumé L’utilisation des associations de la mémoire implicite comprend depuis peu l’évaluation des jeux vidéo et des jeux de hasard dans le vocabulaire de la dépendance. Le problème des associations de la mémoire réside toutefois dans le caractère ouvert des réponses qui doivent être codées, ce qui est souvent à haute intensité de main-d’œuvre et coûteux. De plus, il est parfois impossible de résoudre l’ambiguïté. La présente étude évalue l’autocodage par les participants des associations de la mémoire par rapport au codage effectué par le chercheur dans le cadre des jeux vidéo et des jeux de hasard. On a demandé à un échantillon de 3 176 Canadiens d’âge adulte de répondre à dix mots ambigus et dix associations comportementales potentielles en rapport avec la participation à des jeux vidéo ou des jeux de hasard. On leur a ensuite demandé de classer leurs réponses dans différentes catégories, y compris les jeux vidéo et les jeux de hasard. Tout comme dans la documentation sur les associations de mémoire dans le domaine de l’alcool et de la marijuana, les pointages autocodés pour les jeux vidéo et les jeux de hasard étaient considérablement plus élevés que ceux codés par les chercheurs, faisaient l’objet d’une corrélation beaucoup plus élevée avec des comportements autodéclarés, et amélioraient considérablement la prédiction de comportements liés aux jeux vidéo et aux jeux de hasard.

Similarity Leads to Correlated Processing: A Dynamic Model of Encoding and Recognition of Episodic Associations

We present a model of the encoding of episodic associations between items, extending the dynamic approach to retrieval and decision making of Cox and Shiffrin (2017) to the dynamics of encoding. This model is the first unified account of how similarity affects associative encoding and recognition, including why studied pairs consisting of similar items are easier to recognize, why it is easy to reject novel pairs that recombine items that were studied alongside similar items, and why there is an early bias to falsely recognize novel pairs consisting of similar items that is later suppressed (Dosher, 1984; Dosher & Rosedale, 1991). Items are encoded by sampling features into limited-capacity parallel channels in working memory. Associations are encoded by conjoining features across these channels. Because similar items have common features, their channels are correlated which increases the capacity available to encode associative information. The model additionally accounts for data from a new experiment illustrating the importance of similarity for associative encoding across a variety of stimulus types (objects, words, and abstract forms) and types of similarity (perceptual or conceptual), illustrating the generality of the model.