Trichotomous processes in early memory development, aging, and neurocognitive impairment: A unified theory.

Abstract

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link IN PRESS: Psychological Review AbstractOne of the most extensively investigated topics in the adult memory literature, dual memory processes, has had virtually no impact on the study of early memory development. We remove the key obstacles to such research by formulating a trichotomous theory of recall that combines the traditional dual processes of recollection and familiarity with a reconstruction process. The theory is then embedded in a hidden Markov model that measures all three processes with low-burden tasks that are appropriate for even young children. These techniques are applied to a large corpus of developmental studies of recall, yielding stable findings about the emergence of dual memory processes between childhood and young adulthood and generating tests of many theoretical predictions. The techniques are extended to the study of healthy aging and to the memory sequelae of common forms of cognitive impairment, resulting in a theoretical framework that is unified over four major domains of memory research: early development, mainstream adult research, aging, and cognitive impairment. The techniques are also extended to recognition, creating a unified dual-process framework for recall and recognition.Keywords: memory development, dual memory processes, aging, cognitive impairment, hidden Markov models Trichotomous Processes in Early Memory Development, Aging, and Cognitive Impairment:A Unified Theory This paper has three objectives. The first is to resolve a fundamental problem in memory development research; the second is to apply that solution to a large corpus of developmental studies of recall; and the third is to extend the solution to memory changes that occur during healthy aging and in certain forms of cognitive impairment. The problem in question is the scant impact that dual-process distinctions have had on the study of early (child-to-young-adult) memory development. The result is a dramatic disparity in knowledge about dual memory processes in adults, which is vast, versus knowledge about how those processes first evolve, which is thin and inconsistent. Our solution, as will be seen, is (a) to propose a trichotomous theory of recall that subsumes traditional dual-process distinctions, (b) to implement that theory in a low-burden family of tasks that are appropriate for even very young children, and (c) to show that a new mathematical model of those tasks can be used to measure the development of trichotomous memory processes and to test theoretical predictions about them. Concerning the second objective, we show that an attractive feature of this solution is that a developmental data base exists that can be analyzed with the model, thereby closing the gap in knowledge about early memory development. With respect to the third objective, unlike early development, the study of memory changes during aging and in cognitive impairment have been strong...

On the susceptibility of adaptive memory to false memory illusions

“…The true recall rates were not as consistent with our predictions as we would have liked, but this may simply be due to the fact that the tasks are reflecting different processes: recall tasks require more reconstructive processing whereas recognition tasks may rely more on judgments of familiarity (for a more detailed consideration of differences between recall and recognition, see Brainerd, Reyna, & Howe, 2009). Indeed, it is not unusual to find differences of this sort between recall and recognition tasks for lists varying in valence (e.g., Howe, 2007;Howe, Candel, Otgaar, Malone, & Wimmer, in press).…”

Age-related differences in memory after attending to distinctiveness or similarity during learning

“…An interesting question for further study is whether encoding processes that highlight attention to similarity may strengthen gistbased memory representations in older adults, and in turn lead to preserved memory performance. It also may be that older adults have a "default mode" of using gist-based encoding (Brainerd et al, 2009;Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997), and can thus benefit when attending to similarities among encoded stimuli. Providing initial support for this notion, analyses of the relation between task ratings at encoding and memory performance revealed that in older but not in younger adults, increasing similarity ratings were associated with increasing rates of recollection.…”

“…Conversely, based on data suggesting a reduced ability among older adults to associate stimuli with their distinctive stimulus features (Naveh-Benjamin, 2000) as well as a reduced ability to encode unique memory representations (Stark et al, 2013;Toner et al, 2009;Wilson et al, 2006), we hypothesized that recollection would not be modulated by encoding task in older participants. Given prior work demonstrating that older adults preferentially rely on gist-based memory (Brainerd, Reyna, & Howe, 2009;Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997), we also explored an alternative hypothesis that in older adults attending to similarity may lead to higher rates of recollection than attending to distinctiveness to the extent that processing similarity favors the formation of gist-based memories.…”

The role of phantom recollection in false recall

“…with a judgment operation that assesses the products of reconstruction (e.g., Brainerd, Payne, Wright, & Reyna, 2003;Brainerd, Reyna, & Howe, 2009;Brainerd, Wright, Reyna, & Payne, 2002;Reyna & Mills, 2007; also see Barnhardt, Choi, Gerkens, & Smith, 2006). Although there are numerous dual-process conceptions of recognition (e.g., Atkinson & Juola, 1973, 1974Atkinson & Westcourt, 1975;Gillund & Shiffrin, 1984;Horton, Pavlick, & Moulin-Julian, 1993), this is not the case with recall.…”

“…There are a number of other reasons to expect that the phenomenological experience of false recall may be less vivid than that of false recognition. First, according to dual-recall theory (Barnhardt et al, 2006;Brainerd et al, 2009;Payne et al, 1996), early output is dominated by direct access to verbatim traces and recollective phenomenology, but later output is dominated by reconstruction from gist and nonrecollective phenomenology. Intrusions of semantic associates, in both standard and DRM recall, occur chiefly at the end of output sequences (e.g., Brainerd, Reyna, Harnishfeger, & Howe, 1993;Payne et al, 1996;Roediger & McDermott, 1995), suggesting that they are reconstructions not accompanied by recollective phenomenology.…”