Reminding as a basis for temporal judgments

Reminders can enhance or impair episodic memory updating: a memory-for-change perspective

The Memory-for-Change framework proposes that retrieving episodic memories can facilitate new learning when changes between existing memories and new information are integrated during encoding and later recollected. Four experiments examined whether reminders could improve memory updating and enhance new learning. Participants studied two study lists of word pairs and were given a cued recall test on responses from both lists. Reminders of List 1 words pairs (A-B) appeared immediately before List 2 words pairs that included repeated cues and changed responses (A-D). Across experiments, we varied the types of reminders to determine whether differences in their effectiveness as retrieval cues would influence memory for the list membership of responses. We found that presenting intact reminders (cue-response) enhanced the memory benefits associated with recollection-based retrieval of changes relative to when no reminders appeared and when partial reminders (cue-only) appeared with and without feedback. Importantly, cue-response reminders benefitted memory when they were recognised in List 2 and when changes were later recollected. This suggests that integrative encoding can be facilitated when substantial environmental support is available to cue retrieval of existing memories. These findings have practical implications for understanding which reminders best aid the correction of memories for inaccurate information.

Research Strategy in the Study of Memory: Fads, Fallacies, and the Search for the "Coordinates of Truth"

This article presents an evaluation of research strategy in the psychology of memory. To the extent that a strategy can be discerned, it appears less than optimal in several respects. It relates only weakly to subjective experience, it does not clearly differentiate between structure and strategy, and it is oriented more toward remembering which words were in a list than to the diverse functions that memory serves. This last limitation fosters assumptions about memory that are false: that encoding and retrieval are distinct modes of operation; that the effects of repetition, duration, and recency are interchangeable; and that memory is ahistorical. Theories that parsimoniously explain data from single tasks will never generalize to memory as a whole because their core assumptions are too limited. Instead, memory theory should be based on a broad variety of evidence. Using findings from several memory tasks and observations of everyday memory, I suggest some ways in which involuntary reminding plays a central role in cognition. The evolutionary purpose of memory may have been the construction and maintenance-through reminding-of a spatio-temporal model of the environment. I conclude by recommending ways in which efficiency of the field's research strategy might be improved.

Proactive effects of memory in young and older adults: the role of change recollection

Age-related deficits in episodic memory are sometimes attributed to older adults being more susceptible to proactive interference. These deficits have been explained by impaired abilities to inhibit competing information and to recollect target information. In the present article, I propose that a change recollection deficit also contributes to age differences in proactive interference. Change recollection occurs when individuals can remember how information changed across episodes, and this counteracts proactive interference by preserving the temporal order of information. Three experiments were conducted to determine whether older adults are less likely to counteract proactive interference by recollecting change. Paired-associate learning paradigms with two lists of word pairs included pairs that repeated across lists, pairs that only appeared in List 2 (control items), and pairs with cues that repeated and responses that changed across lists. Young and older adults' abilities to detect changed pairs in List 2 and to later recollect those changes at test were measured, along with cued recall of the List 2 responses and confidence in recall performance. Change recollection produced proactive facilitation in the recall of changed pairs, whereas the failure to recollect change resulted in proactive interference. Confidence judgments were sensitive to these effects. The critical finding was that older adults recollected change less than did young adults, and this partially explained older adults' greater susceptibility to proactive interference. These findings have theoretical implications, showing that a change recollection deficit contributes to age-related deficits in episodic memory.

Prospective and retrospective duration memory in the hippocampus: is time in the foreground or background?

Psychologists have long distinguished between prospective and retrospective timing to highlight the difference between our sense of duration during an experience in passing and our sense of duration in hindsight. Humans and other animals use prospective timing in the seconds-to-minutes range in order to learn durations, and can organize their behaviour based upon this knowledge when they know that duration information will be important ahead of time. By contrast, when durations are estimated after the fact, thus precluding the subject from consciously attending to temporal information, duration information must be extracted from other memory representations. The accumulated evidence from prospective timing research has generally led to the hippocampus (HPC) being casted in a supporting role with prefrontal-striatal, cortical or cerebellar circuits playing the lead. Here, I review findings from the animal and human literature that have led to this conclusion and consider that the contribution of the HPC to duration memory is understated because we have little understanding about how we remember duration.

Trips Down Memory Lane: Recall Direction Affects the Subjective Distance of Past Events

The subjective temporal distance of a past event—how close or far away it feels—is influenced by numerous factors apart from actual time. The current studies extend research on subjective distance by exploring the experience of remembering autobiographical events as part of a stream of related events. The temporal direction in which events are recalled was proposed as a key determinant of subjective distance. Five experiments supported the hypothesis that people feel closer to a target event when they recall a stream of related events in a backward direction (i.e., a reverse-chronological order ending with the target event) rather than a forward direction (i.e., a chronological order beginning with the target event). The effect of recall direction was mediated by people's perceptions of change in their lives. Backward recall created the impression that relatively little had changed since the target event, which in turn made the event feel closer.

The role of reminding in long-term memory for temporal order

Order codes are one of the three main types of information that have been hypothesized to underlie memory for the times of life events. Published evidence for the theory, however, has come exclusively from research in which brief retention intervals have been used. In the first of two studies, 101 adults judged the order of pairs of movies released 5-14 years ago, half of which shared a common major actor. There was no evidence that related films could be ordered more accurately than unrelated ones. In the second study, 88 students were presented with in-class announcements that were either related or unrelated to an earlier announcement. Three weeks later,they judged the order of the pairs of announcements. There was no difference between the accuracy for the related and the unrelated pairs. The findings do not support the proposal that the automatic creation of order information at the time of encoding contributes to autobiographical memory.

Judgment of frequency versus recognition confidence: Repetition and recursive reminding

Judgments of presentation frequency (JOFs) were compared with recognition confidence ratings (RCRs) in a single memory experiment. Two differences were found: (1) Relative to the effect of exposure duration, frequency had a larger effect on JOF than it had on RCR. (2) Replicating a finding by Proctor (1977), normalized memory operating characteristic (zMOC) curves for JOF had slopes greater than 1.0, whereas those for RCR had slopes of less than 1.0. The slope difference was found to be attributable to the first study trial. The results are contrary to the hypothesis that a single strength or familiarity dimension underlies JOF and RCR. To explain both findings, a new hypothetical basis of JOF is proposed. Repetition is assumed to trigger study phase reminding, which, in turn, is encoded into memory. Remindings can be recursively embedded, and the depth of recursion, recollected at test, is the primary basis of JOF. The hypothesis appears consistent with a broad range of JOF findings.

Ordering autobiographical experiences

This study examined individuals' memory for the temporal order of autobiographical events and for the components that constitute autobiographical events. Study 1 measured performance on an across-event ordering task that involved the chronological arrangement of cards that displayed event labels. Results indicated poor ordering ability across events, but a reasonable ability to order clusters of events. Study 2 compared within-event and across-event ordering using computer-presented digital photographs. Participants were better at ordering the photographs in their own across-event trials than in their within-event trials. The results are discussed in terms of the retrieval of temporal information under within- and across-event conditions.

Adult age differences in temporal memory for cyclic actions

Adult age differences in temporal memory for bipolar or cyclic actions were investigated in three experiments. Cyclic actions are ones that have opposite poles in regard to their effect on an object (e.g., opening and closing a purse). For such actions, the critical memory function is to remember which pole occurred last. Temporal memory was tested by having subjects judge which component of a series of bipolar actions had been performed more recently (e.g., opening or closing a purse). Recency judgments were found to be as accurate under incidental memory conditions as they were under intentional memory conditions for both young and elderly adults. The accuracy of recency judgments was less for bipolar actions performed in three cycles than for bipolar actions performed in one cycle for both young and elderly adults. Adult age differences in the accuracy of recency judgments were found to be negligible.

Spacing judgments as an index of integration from context-induced relational processing: implications for the free recall of ambiguous prose passages

The effect of information integration on the recall of ambiguous prose passages was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects read ambiguous passages that were difficult to comprehend without titles. In judging the relative positions in the passages of pairs of test sentences, subjects performed better when they read passages headed by a suitable title than when they read untitled passages or received a title at the time of testing. In Experiment 2, subjects provided with a title at encoding also better discriminated complete old sentences from foils composed of fragments of two different old sentences than did subjects provided with no titles or with titles at the time of testing. These two tests index the degree of inter- and intrasentence information integration, respectively. Two findings indicated that integration affected free recall of an ambiguous passage. First, when the degree of integration of the passage's propositions was controlled, free recall of the passage was no different for subjects who did or did not know the passage's title at encoding. Second, inducing subjects to comprehend the passage's sentences individually, without relating them to one another, reduced free recall of the passage.

Temporal coding in rhythm tasks revealed by modality effects

Temporal coding has been studied by examining the perception and reproduction of rhythms and by examining memory for the order of events in a list. We attempt to link these research programs both empirically and theoretically. Glenberg and Swanson (1986) proposed that the superior recall of auditory material, compared with visual material, reflects more accurate temporal coding for the auditory material. In this paper, we demonstrate that a similar modality effect can be produced in a rhythm task. Auditory rhythms composed of stimuli of two durations are reproduced more accurately than are visual rhythms. Furthermore, it appears that the auditory superiority reflects enhanced chunking of the auditory material rather than better identification of durations.

Memory for temporal order in schizophrenia

Memory for temporal order information was examined in patients with chronic schizophrenia using the recency discrimination task. In this task, subjects were shown a pair of previously studied words and were asked to choose which one of the two words they had seen more recently. In addition, subjects performed the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The results showed that schizophrenic patients differed from normal control subjects in their performance on the recency discrimination task. In addition, for schizophrenic patients, performance on the recency discrimination task was inversely related to the number of perseverative errors on the WCST. These results provide further evidence of prefrontal-type cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.

Common processes underlie enhanced recency effects for auditory and changing-state stimuli

For some stimuli, dynamic changes are crucial for identifying just what the stimuli are. For example, spoken words (or any auditory stimuli) require change over time to be recognized. Kallman and Cameron (1989) have proposed that this sort of dynamic change underlies the enhanced recency effect found for auditory stimuli, relative to visual stimuli. The results of three experiments replicate and extend Kallman and Cameron's finding that dynamic visual stimuli (that is visual stimuli in which movement is necessary to identify the stimuli), relative to static visual stimuli, engender enhanced recency effects. In addition, an analysis based on individual differences is used to demonstrate that the processes underlying enhanced recency effects for auditory and dynamic visual stimuli are substantially similar. These results are discussed in the context of perceptual grouping processes.

Modality effects in the coding and reproduction of rhythms

The temporal coding assumption is that time of presentation is coded more accurately for auditory events than for visual events. This assumption has been used to explain the modality effect, in which recall of recent auditory events is superior to recall of recent visual events. We tested the temporal coding assumption by examining the coding and reproduction of quintessentially temporal stimuli-rhythms. The rhythms were produced by sequences of short and long auditory stimuli or short and long visual stimuli; in either case, the task was to reproduce the temporal sequence. The results from four experiments demonstrated reproduction of auditory rhythms superior to that of visual rhythms. We conclude that speech-based explanations of modality effects cannot accommodate these findings, whereas the findings are consistent with explanations based on the temporal coding assumption.

Impaired acquisition of temporal information in retrosplenial amnesia

In this paper we describe the performance of an amnesic with a left retrosplenial lesion on three memory tasks assessing his ability to judge when a previously learned event had occurred. This patient was dramatically impaired in acquiring temporal information about new stimuli, and this defect could not be attributed to recognition failures or to frontal lobe dysfunction. In contrast to his impaired acquisition of temporal information, he had no difficulty judging the temporal order of remote historical events. The pattern of performance displayed by this patient suggests a specific defect in "time-tagging" of new incoming information.