The components of recollective experience: Remembering and knowing

This project was designed to examine the nature of recollective experience. Gardiner (1988) showed dissociations are obtained within an explicit memory test as a function of several independent variables when subjects classify recognized items into two types of recollection, one termed "Remember" (those items that subjects consciously recollect from the study list) and the other termed "Know" (those items that subjects recognize on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection). Gardiner and his colleagues concluded from their results that "Remember" responses are sensitive to conceptual and "Know" responses to perceptual processing. The present investigation tested this conclusion using the recognition memory task. In Experiment 1 subjects produced semantic associates to some and rhyme associates to other study items. Levels-of-processing effects were observed for recognition and "Remember" judgments. For "Know" judgments, this effect was reversed. A modality match (visual - visual) between study and test events had no effect relative to a modality mismatch (auditory - visual) condition. In Experiment 2, subjects studied pictures and words. The picture superiority effect was obtained for recognition and "Remember" judgments and was reversed for "Know" judgments. In Experiment 3, in the recognition phase, half the studied and nonstudied words were preceded by a brief (50 ms) and masked repetition, and the other items were preceded by masked presentations of unrelated words. Masked repetition enhanced recognition and "Know" responses, but did not affect "Remember" responses. In Experiment 4, subjects made confidence judgments ("Sure"/"Not Sure") to primed or unprimed recognized items. The pattern of priming effects for "Sure"/"Not Sure" responses and "Remember"/"Know" responses (Experiment 3) were dissimilar. In Experiment 5, the primes in the recognition test list were semantically related or unrelated to the test words and were presented longer than repeated primes (SOA = 250 ms). The semantic priming effect was observed only for nonstudied items and was distributed equivalently between "Remember" and "Know" judgments. These results: (1) indicate that "Remember" and "Know" responses are sensitive to conceptual and perceptual factors respectively, (2) provide support for the two-factor theories of recognition memory, and (3) show that "Remember" responses are a "purer" measure of conscious recollection than standard explicit memory tests

Collaborative remembering in older adults: Age-invariant outcomes in the context of episodic recall deficits

Rapidly growing research reveals complex yet systematic consequences of collaboration on memory in young adults, but much less is known about this phenomenon in older adults. Young and older adults studied a list of categorized words and took three successive recall tests. Test 1 and 3 were always taken individually, and Test 2 was done either in triads or alone. Despite older adults recalling less overall than young adults, both age groups exhibited similar costs and benefits of collaboration: Collaboration reduced both correct and false recall during collaborative remembering, was associated with more positive beliefs about its value, and produced reminiscence, collective memory, and some forgetting in its cascading effects on postcollaborative recall. We examine the role of retrieval organization in these effects. As environmental support may play a substantial role in healthy aging, the relatively preserved effects of collaboration on memory in older adults hold promise for testing judicious uses of group remembering in aging. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved

Consideration of Culture in Cognition: How We Can Enrich Methodology and Theory

In this paper, we argue that adopting an inclusive approach where diverse cultures are represented in research is of prime importance for cognitive psychology. The overrepresentation of participant samples and researchers from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultures limits the generalizability of findings and fails to capture potential sources of variability, impeding understanding of human cognition. In an analysis of articles in representative cognitive psychology journals over the five-year period of 2016-2020, we find that only approximately 7% of articles consider culture, broadly defined. Of these articles, a majority (83%) focus on language or bilingualism, with small numbers of articles considering other aspects of culture. We argue that methodology and theory developed in the last century of cognitive research can be not only leveraged, but will be enriched both by more diverse populations and researchers. Such advances pave the way to uncover cognitive processes that may be universal or systematically differ as a function of cultural variations, and the individual differences in relation to cultural variations. To make a case for broadening this scope, we characterize relevant cross-cultural research, sample classic cognitive research that is congruent with such an approach, and discuss compatibility between a cross-cultural perspective and the classic tenets of cognitive psychology. We make recommendations for large and small steps for the field to incorporate greater cultural representation in the study of cognition, while recognizing the challenges associated with these efforts and acknowledging that not every research question calls for a cross-cultural perspective

Collaboration changes both the content and the structure of memory : building the architecture of shared representations

Memory research has primarily focused on how individuals form and maintain memories across time. However, less is known about how groups of people working together can create and maintain shared memories of the past. Recent studies have focused on understanding the processes behind the formation of such shared memories, but none has investigated the structure of shared memory. This study investigated the circumstances under which collaboration would influence the likelihood that participants come to share both a similar content and a similar organization of the past by aligning their individual representations into a shared rendering. We tested how the frequency and the timing of collaboration affect participants' retrieval organization, and how this in turn influences the formation of shared memory and its persistence over time. Across numerous foundational and novel analyses, we observed that as the size of the collaborative inhibition effect-a counterintuitive finding that collaboration reduces group ecall-increased, so did the amount of shared memory and the shared organization of memories. These findings reveal the interconnected relationship between collaborative inhibition, retrieval disruption, shared memory, and shared organization. Together, these relationships have intriguing implications for research across a wide variety of domains, including the formation of collective memory, beliefs and attitudes, parent- child narratives and the development of autobiographical memory, and the emergence of shared representations in educational settings.15 page(s