Ra’shida Rockette, “Give a Mouse a Cookie: The Influence of Incentives on Inferential Memory”
Mentor: Caitlin Bowman, Psychology, Letters & Science (College of)
Poster #120
Inferential memory allows us to fill in gaps by combining pieces of information learned separately to make conclusions that have not been presented to us directly (Bunsey and Eichenbaum, 1996). This skill is important to everyday life as it allows us to make predictions about the future, solve problems and learn new information. There are conflicting theories about whether memory for direct experiences and inferences rely on the same or different cognitive and neural mechanisms. In the present study, we will test whether participants can strategically prioritize direct memory versus inference. We are using an inferential memory task in which participants will gain points for correct responses, and we will manipulate the number of points received. In some cases, participants will be told that remembering direct experiences will be worth more points. In other cases, they will be told that making inferences will be worth more points. We will then compare direct memory and inference performance under these two incentive conditions. Initially, we plan to collect data from 30 young adults (18-30) from UWM’s psychology student pool. We hypothesize that incentivizing inference will improve both direct memory and inferences, whereas incentivizing direct memory will only benefit direct memory. Further, there is also evidence that this skill decreases in older adults over time due to a change in hippocampus function (Ryan et al., 2016). As a future direction, we will collect data from 30 older adults (60+) from the Milwaukee community. We expect that incentivizing inference will be especially helpful for older adults because they do not tend to make these inferences without prompting.