Are mnemonic failures and benefits two sides of the same coin?: Investigating the real-world consequences of individual differences in memory integration

Abstract

Theories of reconstructive memory have long been influenced by investigations of false recognition errors, in which old/new judgements are compromised by spontaneous activation of associated but nonpresented concepts. Recent evidence similarly suggests that reconstructive memory processes (so-called memory integration) also support positive learning behaviors, such as inferential reasoning. Despite prevailing hypotheses, the question of whether a common integration process underlies these seemingly disparate mnemonic outcomes is not well understood. To address this question, young adults, recruited from two institutions, completed the Deese-2017b), all of which depend on integration of related information in memory. Across two experiments, the well-established tasks were adapted such that successful memory integration resulted in the same negative outcome (i.e., false recognition; Experiment 1) or positive outcome (i.e., inferential reasoning; Experiment 2). By capturing variability in item-to-item responding within and among tasks for each person, a common memory integration process was found to elicit positive and negative consequences in paradigms that required the combination of individual units to construct a composite understanding, but only when memory for directly learned and novel, integrated items were modeled together. Furthermore, linking task-related behavior to academic performance revealed that a greater propensity to integrate factual information (but not arbitrary materials) was related to higher SAT scores. Together, these results provide evidence for domain-general and domain-specific reconstructive mechanisms and their role in supporting educational success beyond the laboratory.

Influences of time of day on generalization

“…Our study contributes to this literature by demonstrating that generalization across concepts in a novel semantic domain is better in the morning than evening. Specifically, we found that participants tested in the morning were not only better able to generalize a property (whether a satellite was "functional") to novel exemplars, but they also exhibited more generalization-related false memories, consistent with findings that generalization occurs alongside false memory formation Carpenter & Schacter, 2017;Varga et al, 2019, cf. de Araujo Sanchez & Zeithamova, 2020.…”

“…We assessed how encountering examples of satellites that combine features across previously separate categories facilitates the ability to generalize to novel satellites combining features from the same categories. Given that generalization can coincide with false memory formation Carpenter & Schacter, 2017;Varga et al, 2019, cf. de Araujo Sanchez & Zeithamova, 2020, we also examined false memories for these novel bridge satellites.…”

Contingency of semantic generalization on episodic specificity varies across development

“…Adults' generalization relied on remembering specific item-context representations, consistent with the notion that rapid generalization relies on retrieving specific instances 7,8 and that there was no generalization-specificity trade-off. 28,29 These results suggest that adults' ability to rapidly generalize do not rely on abstractiona process by which memories for the specific instances are lost, but the emergent average representation supports generalization across episodes. 30 Instead, it relies on their ability to remember specifics and then integrate overlapping elements across episodes.…”

Generalization and source memory in acquired equivalence

“…As the last question, we were interested whether the degree of response bias is related to source memory. We especially aimed to test the hypothesis that false memory for inferred relationships may be a flip side of memory integration, whether it happens at encoding or in response to testdemands 9,23,24,32 . First, we compared false memory rates in participants who showed a negative response bias, no bias or a positive response bias (Figure 6A).…”