Projects per year
Abstract
Do complex event representations fragment over time, or are they instead forgotten in an all-or-none manner? For example, if we met a friend in a café and they gave us a present, do we forget the constituent elements of this event (location, person, and object) independently, or would the whole event be forgotten? Research suggests that item-based memories are forgotten in a fragmented manner. However, we do not know how more complex episodic, event-based memories are forgotten. We assessed both retrieval accuracy and dependency-the statistical association between the retrieval successes of different elements from the same event-for complex events. Across 4 experiments, we show that retrieval dependency is found both immediately after learning and following a 12-hr and 1-week delay. Further, the amount of retrieval dependency after a delay is greater than that predicted by a model of independent forgetting. This dependency was only seen for coherent "closed-loops," where all pairwise associations between locations, people, and objects were encoded. When "open-loops" were learned, where only 2 out of the 3 possible associations were encoded, no dependency was seen immediately after learning or after a delay. Finally, we also provide evidence for higher retention rates for closed-loops than for open-loops. Therefore, closed-loops do not fragment as a function of forgetting and are retained for longer than are open-loops. Our findings suggest that coherent episodic events are not only retrieved, but also forgotten, in an all-or-none manner.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 230-248 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Journal of Experimental Psychology: General |
Volume | 149 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 15 Jul 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Feb 2020 |
Bibliographical note
© 2019, The Author(s).Keywords
- Episodic memory
- Forgetting
- Hippocampus
- Statistical modeling
Profiles
Projects
- 1 Finished
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Promoting rapid and sustained learning of novel information: towards a new learning technique for the classroom
ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (ESRC)
1/12/18 → 31/08/22
Project: Research project (funded) › Research
Datasets
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Data, Analyses, and Materials - United we fall: All-or-none forgetting of complex episodic events
Joensen, B. H. (Data Collector), Gaskell, G. (Supervisor) & Horner, A. J. (Creator), University of York, 20 Aug 2018
DOI: 10.15124/f5d23e6b-034f-4936-97b7-d26354fca0bc, https://osf.io/k495x/
Dataset