Jessica Kania, “Does Previewing Overlapping Information Help Young Adults Make Inferences Across Experiences?”
Mentor: Caitlin Bowman, Psychology
Poster #95

Associative memory is the ability to bind together pieces of information in memory. Usually, we form associative memories for items we experience together directly. For example, imagine encountering someone walking a dog in the park and remembering the person-dog association. We can also make indirect associative memories for items experienced at different times. Building on this example, imagine seeing a different person walking the same dog the next day. You might form an association between the two people that you never saw together based on their shared association with the dog. The current study asks whether we can increase formation of indirect associative memories by manipulating exposure to overlapping items. Participants completed a task with an initial study phase, an overlapping item study phase, and an associative memory test. During the initial study phase, participants learned object pairs. In the overlapping item study phase, participants learned new object pairs consisting of one new object and one overlapping object from a previously learned pair. Critically, we manipulated exposure time to these objects such that the overlapping object was presented two seconds before, at the same time, or two seconds after the new object. Participants were then tested on the direct and indirect pairs from the study phases. We predicted that presenting the overlapping object two seconds before the new object would increase performance on indirect pairs because participants would use that time to retrieve the original pairing and form a memory for all three objects together. Preliminary results suggest that this is not the case: we do not see differences in indirect associative memory based on how the overlapping item is presented in the second study phase. While further data collection is needed, these findings suggest that participants do not spontaneously retrieve and integrate previously learned associations when given the opportunity.