Cue overlap supports preretrieval selection in episodic memory: ERP evidence

People often want to recall events of a particular kind, but this selective remembering is not always possible. We contrasted two candidate mechanisms: the overlap between retrieval cues and stored memory traces, and the ease of recollection. In two preregistered experiments (Ns = 28), we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to quantify selection occurring before retrieval and the goal states — retrieval orientations — thought to achieve this selection. Participants viewed object pictures or heard object names, and one of these sources was designated as targets in each memory test. We manipulated cue overlap by probing memory with visual names (Experiment 1) or line drawings (Experiment 2). Results revealed that regardless of which source was targeted, the left parietal ERP effect indexing recollection was selective when test cues overlapped more with the targeted than non-targeted information, despite consistently better memory for pictures. ERPs for unstudied items also were more positive-going when cue overlap was high, suggesting that engagement of retrieval orientations reflected availability of external cues matching the targeted source. The data support the view that selection can act before recollection if there is sufficient overlap between retrieval cues and targeted versus competing memory traces.

Syntactic and semantic interference in sentence comprehension: Support from English and German eye-tracking data

A long-standing debate in the sentence processing literature concerns the time course of syntactic and semantic information in online sentence comprehension. The default assumption in cue-based models of parsing is that syntactic and semantic retrieval cues simultaneously guide dependency resolution. When retrieval cues match multiple items in memory, this leads to similarity-based interference. Both semantic and syntactic interferencehave been shown to occur in English. However, the relative timing of syntactic vs. semantic interference remains unclear. In this first-ever cross-linguistic investigation of the time course of syntactic vs. semantic interference, the data from two eye-tracking reading experiments (English and German) suggest that the two types of interference can in principle arise simultaneously during retrieval. However, the data also indicate that semantic cues may be evaluated with a small timing lag in German compared to English. This suggests that there may be cross-linguistic variation in how syntactic and semantic cues are used to resolve linguistic dependencies in real-time.

Inducing Amnesia for Unwanted Memories through Subliminal Reactivation

Traumatic memories contribute to psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobias. Treatment of these disorders may benefit from techniques that reduce the accessibility of unwanted memories and their impact on cognition and emotion. Procedures such as retrieval suppression, associative interference, and reconsolidation disruption, though effective in inducing forgetting, involve exposure to the traumatic event, which is aversive and carries risks to the patient. But is explicit awareness of traumatic content truly necessary for effective voluntary forgetting? Recently, intentionally suppressing (i.e., stopping) retrieval of a memory in response to a reminder has been shown to temporarily interrupt hippocampal function. Disrupting hippocampal function through retrieval suppression induces an amnesic shadow that impairs the encoding and stabilization of unrelated “innocent bystander” memories that are activated near in time to people’s effort to suppress retrieval. Building on this mechanism, we successfully disrupted retention of unpleasant memories by subliminally reactivating them within this amnesic shadow window (on 88 participants across two experiments). Following the characteristics of retrieval suppression, the amnesic shadow disrupted memory for the subliminally reactivated events and induced forgetting that generalized across retrieval cues. Critically, whereas unconscious forgetting occurred on these affective “innocent bystander” memories, the amnesic shadow itself was induced by conscious suppression of unrelated and benign neutral memories, avoiding direct conscious re-exposure of unwelcome content. Combining the amnesic shadow with subliminal reactivation may offer a new approach to forgetting trauma that bypasses the unpleasantness in conscious exposure to unwanted memories.

Leaping across the mental canyon: Higher-order long-distance analogical retrieval

Previous experiments have shown that a comparison of two written narratives highlights theirshared relational structure, which in turn facilitates the retrieval of analogous narratives from the past (e.g., Gentner, Loewenstein, Thompson, & Forbus, 2009). However, analogical retrieval occurs across domains that appear more conceptually distant than merely different narratives, and the deepest analogies use matches in higher-order relational structure. The present study investigated whether comparison can facilitate analogical retrieval of higher-order relations across written narratives and abstract symbolic problems. Participants read stories which became retrieval targets after a delay, cued by either analogous stories or letter-strings. In Experiment 1 we replicated Gentner et al. who used narrative retrieval cues, and also found preliminary evidence for retrieval between narrative and symbolic domains. In Experiment 2 we found clear evidence that a comparison of analogous letter-string problems facilitated the retrieval of source stories with analogous higher-order relations. Experiment 3 replicated the retrieval results of Experiment 2 but with a longer delay between encoding and recall, and a greater number of distractor source stories. These experiments offer support for the schema induction account of analogical retrieval (Gentner et al., 2009) and show that the schemas abstracted from comparison of narratives can be transferred to non-semantic symbolic domains.

Poison Parasite Counter: Turning Duplicitous Mass Communications Into Self-Negating Memory-Retrieval Cues

Disinformation in politics, advertising, and mass communications has proliferated in recent years. Few counterargumentation strategies have proven effective at undermining a deceptive message over time. This article introduces the Poison Parasite Counter (PPC), a cognitive-science-based strategy for durably countering deceptive communications. The PPC involves inserting a strong (poisonous) counter-message, just once, into a close replica of a deceptive rival’s original communication. In parasitic fashion, the original communication then “hosts” the counter-message, which is recalled on each reexposure to the original communication. The strategy harnesses associative memory to turn the original communication into a retrieval cue for a negating counter-message. Seven experiments ( N = 3,679 adults) show that the PPC lastingly undermines a duplicitous rival’s original communication, influencing judgments of communicator honesty and favorability as well as real political donations.

Groupitizing reflects conceptual developments in math cognition and inequities in math achievement from childhood through adolescence.

Groupitizing – the ability to take advantage of grouping cues to rapidly enumerate sets that otherwise require serial counting – is linked to conceptual aspects of numbers (accessing the cardinality of subgroups) and math (combining the subgroups values) that rapidly emerge during the first years of schooling (Starkey & McCandliss, 2014). Little else is known about its broader role in mathematical development. This study followed the development of groupitizing skill from late childhood through early adolescence (N = 1,209), revealing a pattern of progressive development over these critical years for math achievement. Individual differences were highly predictive of global math achievement from 3rd to 8th grade, above and beyond socioeconomic and cognitive (domain-general and math-specific) predictors. Experimental manipulations of item grouping cues (number of subgroups, numerical composition of subgroups) lead to similar effects that manipulations of operands have on symbolic mathematical reasoning, corroborating the view that groupitizing draws upon the same conceptual processes as symbolic math even in the absence of well-learned symbolic retrieval cues. Finally, we show that groupitizing provides new cognitive insights into the nature of the socioeconomic status achievement gap, which cannot be fully explained by familiarity with specific symbolic math facts learned in school but rather suggest inequities in educational opportunities that promote flexible mastery of conceptual processes. Taken together, groupitizing – as a non-symbolic assessment of conceptual processes in mathematics – could be a critical tool in implicitly assessing math ability.

Application of an artificial intelligence algorithm model of memory retrieval and roaming in sorting Chinese medicinal materials

In order to capture autobiographical memory, inspired by the development of human intelligence, a computational AM model for autobiographical memory is proposed in this paper, which is a three-layer network structure, in which the bottom layer encodes the event-specific knowledge comprising 5W1H, and provides retrieval clues to the middle layer, encodes the related events, and the top layer encodes the event set. According to the bottom-up memory search process, the corresponding events and event sets can be identified in the middle layer and the top layer respectively; At the same time, AM model can simulate human memory roaming through the process of rule-based memory retrieval. The computational AM model proposed in this paper not only has robust and flexible memory retrieval, but also has better response performance to noisy memory retrieval cues than the commonly used memory retrieval model based on keyword query method, and can also imitate the roaming phenomenon in memory.

Sequential consumer choice as multi-cued retrieval

Fulfilling goals in open-ended tasks like grocery shopping requires sequential navigation of countless options. When deciding what to choose next, we propose that past choices cue retrieval of subsequent options from memory. Moreover, each past choice may function as a cue to multiple knowledge sources, such as episodic, semantic, and hierarchical relationships involving the item. We evaluate this account of open-ended sequential choice on the purchase sequences of over 100,000 online grocery shoppers. Consistent with our account, we find that consumer choices are predicted by their similarity with their previous choice, suggesting that past choices cue retrieval of subsequent options. Products that co-occurred in the same episode, were nearby in semantic space, or neighbours in a semantic hierarchy were most likely to be chosen, suggesting that consumers queried multiple types of long-term knowledge. We evaluated a wide array of formal models and found that the one that best accounted for people's choices included retrieval cues for all three knowledge types. Models fits to individuals allowed us to assess how much they relied upon each knowledge type. The type of knowledge that people most relied upon determined the type of errors they made; more episodic retrievals predicted fewer forgotten items and more semantic retrievals predicted more items being added to one's basket that they didn't otherwise need. Our results demonstrate how basic retrieval mechanisms shape sequential choices in real-world, goal-directed tasks.

Self-paced part-list cuing

Ironically, the presentation of a subset of studied material as retrieval cues at test often impairs recall of the remaining (target) material—an effect known as part-list cuing impairment. Part-list cues are typically provided at the beginning of the recall period, a time when nearly all individuals would be able to recall at least some studied items on their own. Across two experiments, we examined the effects of part-list cuing when student participants could decide on their own when the cues were presented during the recall period. Results showed that participants activated the cues relatively late in the recall period, when recall was already close to asymptote. Critically, such delayed cuing no longer impaired recall performance. The detrimental effect of part-list cuing, as it has been demonstrated numerous times in the memory literature, thus seems to depend on presentating the cue items (too) early in the recall period.