Memory updating and the structure of event representations.

People form memories of specific events and use those memories to make predictions about similar new experiences. Living in a dynamic environment presents a challenge: How does one represent valid prior events in memory while encoding new experiences when things change? There is evidence for two seemingly contradictory classes of mechanism: One differentiates outdated event features by making them less similar or less accessible than updated event features. The other integrates updated features of new events with outdated memories, and the relationship between them, into a structured representation.

Semantic relatedness proactively benefits learning, memory, and interdependence across episodes.

Over the past century of memory research, the interplay between initial and later-learned information in determining long-term memory retention has been of central interest. A likely factor for determining whether initial and later memories interfere with or strengthen each other is semantic relatedness. Relatedness has been shown to boost initial memory and increase the interdependence between earlier and more recent experiences in memory.

Remembering change: Interdependence between change awareness and meaningful connection in achieving proactive facilitation.

Two experiments investigated proactive facilitation (PF) or proactive interference (PI) in the recall of recently learned targets, under conditions of assessing the detection and recollection of target changes across two learning phases (with A-B/A-D word pairs). Some changes established meaningful connections across the phases; others did not. Task instructions on the subsequent cued-recall test (Experiment 1) or during Phase 2 study (Experiment 2) guided participants (university students) to monitor and report the changes.

A response time model of the three-choice Mnemonic Similarity Task provides stable, mechanistically interpretable individual-difference measures.

Introduction: The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) is a widely used measure of individual tendency to discern small differences between remembered and presently presented stimuli. Significant work has established this measure as a reliable index of neurological and cognitive dysfunction and decline. However, questions remain about the neural and psychological mechanisms that support performance in the task.

Correcting fake news headlines after repeated exposure: memory and belief accuracy in younger and older adults.

The efficacy of fake news corrections in improving memory and belief accuracy may depend on how often adults see false information before it is corrected. Two experiments tested the competing predictions that repeating fake news before corrections will either impair or improve memory and belief accuracy. These experiments also examined whether fake news exposure effects would differ for younger and older adults due to age-related differences in the recollection of contextual details.

Memory and belief updating following complete and partial reminders of fake news.

Fake news can have enduring effects on memory and beliefs. An ongoing theoretical debate has investigated whether corrections (fact-checks) should include reminders of fake news. The familiarity backfire account proposes that reminders hinder correction (increasing interference), whereas integration-based accounts argue that reminders facilitate correction (promoting memory integration).

On the role of memory in misinformation corrections: Repeated exposure, correction durability, and source credibility.

Misinformation can negatively affect cognition, beliefs, and behavior, and thus contribute to societal disruption. Correcting misinformation can counteract these effects by updating memory and beliefs. In this selective review, we highlight recent perspectives on and evidence for the role of memory in the efficacy of correction methods.

PEPPR: A post-encoding pre-production reinstatement model of dual-list free recall.

Recent events are easy to recall, but they also interfere with the recall of more distant, non-recent events. In many computational models, non-recent memories are recalled by using the context associated with those events as a cue. Some models, however, do little to explain how people initially activate non-recent contexts in the service of accurate recall.

Testing can enhance episodic memory updating in younger and older adults.

Older adults sometimes show impaired memory for recent episodes, especially those that are similar but not identical to existing memories. Two experiments examined if interpolated testing between episodes improves recent memories for older and younger adults ( = 60 per group and experiment). Participants studied two lists of cue-response word pairs.

Interpolated retrieval retroactively increases recall and promotes cross-episode memory interdependence.

Retrieving existing memories before new learning can lead to retroactive facilitation. Three experiments examined whether interpolated retrieval is associated with retroactive facilitation and memory interdependence that reflects integrative encoding. Participants studied two lists of cue-response word pairs that repeated across lists (A-B, A-B), appeared in list 1 (A-B, -), or included the same cues with changed responses in each list (A-B, A-C).

Adult age differences in event memory updating: The roles of prior-event retrieval and prediction.

Remembering past events can lead to predictions of what is to come and to experiencing prediction errors when things change. Previous research has shown enhanced memory updating for ongoing events that are inconsistent with predictions based on past experiences. According to the Event Memory Retrieval and Comparison (EMRC) Theory, such memory updating depends on the encoding of configural representations that bind retrieved features of the previous event, changed features, and the relationship between the two.

Mnemonic discrimination deficits in multidimensional schizotypy.

Current developmental psychopathology models indicate that schizophrenia can be understood as the most extreme expression of a multidimensional continuum of symptoms and impairment referred to as schizotypy. In nondisordered adults, schizotypy predicts risk for developing schizophrenia-spectrum psychopathology. Schizophrenia is associated with disruptions in detecting subtle differences between objects, which is linked to hippocampal dysfunction.

Impaired mnemonic discrimination in children and adolescents at risk for schizophrenia.

People with schizophrenia and their high-risk, first-degree relatives report widespread episodic memory impairments that are purportedly due, at least in part, to failures of mnemonic discrimination. Here, we examined the status of mnemonic discrimination in 36 children and adolescents (aged 11-17 years) with and without familial risk for schizophrenia by employing an object-based recognition task called the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST). The MST assesses the ability to discriminate between studied images and unstudied images that are either perceptually similar to studied images or completely novel.

Self-reported encoding quality promotes lure rejections and false alarms.

The hippocampus supports distinctive encoding, enabling discrimination of perceptions from similar memories. Here, an experimental and individual differences approach examined the role of encoding quality in the classification of similar lures. An object recognition task included thought probes during study and similar lures at test.

Stuck in the past? Rumination-related memory integration.

Memories connected to ruminative concerns repetitively capture attention, even in situations designed to alter them. However, recent research on memory updating suggests that memory for benign substitutes (e.g.

Fake news reminders and veracity labels differentially benefit memory and belief accuracy for news headlines.

Fake news exposure can negatively affect memory and beliefs, thus sparking debate about whether to repeat misinformation during corrections. The once-prevailing view was that repeating misinformation increases its believability and should thus be avoided. However, misinformation reminders have more recently been shown to enhance memory and belief accuracy.

Adult age differences in subjective context retrieval in dual-list free recall.

Age-related episodic memory deficits imply that older and younger adults differentially retrieve and monitor contextual features that indicate the source of studied information. Such differences have been shown in subjective reports during recognition and cued recall as well as process estimates derived from computational models of free recall organisation. The present study extends the subject report method to free recall to characterise age differences in context retrieval and monitoring, and to test assumptions from a context-based computational model.

Recalling fake news during real news corrections can impair or enhance memory updating: the role of recollection-based retrieval.

Fake news can impair memory leading to societal controversies such as COVID-19 vaccine efficacy. The pernicious influence of fake news is clear when ineffective corrections leave memories outdated. A key theoretical issue is whether people should recall fake news while reading corrections with contradictory details.

Understanding Everyday Events: Predictive-Looking Errors Drive Memory Updating.

Memory-guided predictions can improve event comprehension by guiding attention and the eyes to the location where an actor is about to perform an action. But when events change, viewers may experience predictive-looking errors and need to update their memories. In two experiments (s = 38 and 98), we examined the consequences of mnemonic predictive-looking errors for comprehending and remembering event changes.

Episodic memory impairment in children and adolescents at risk for schizophrenia: A role for context processing.

People with schizophrenia experience episodic memory impairments that have been theorized to reflect deficits in processing context (e.g., spatio-temporal features tied to a specific event).

Intrinsic functional connectivity in the default mode network predicts mnemonic discrimination: A connectome-based modeling approach.

The ability to distinguish existing memories from similar perceptual experiences is a core feature of episodic memory. This ability is often examined using the mnemonic similarity task in which people discriminate memories of studied objects from perceptually similar lures. Studies of the neural basis of such mnemonic discrimination have mostly focused on hippocampal function and connectivity.

Directing attention to event changes improves memory updating for older adults.

People use memory for observed actions to guide current perceptions. When actions change from one situation to the next, one must register the change to update memory. Research suggests that older adults may sometimes update memory for naturalistic action changes less effectively than younger adults.

The role of prior-event retrieval in encoding changed event features.

When people experience everyday activities, their comprehension can be shaped by expectations that derive from similar recent experiences, which can affect the encoding of a new experience into memory. When a new experience includes changes-such as a driving route being blocked by construction-this can lead to interference in subsequent memory. One potential mechanism of effective encoding of event changes is the retrieval of related features from previous events.

Aging and the encoding of changes in events: The role of neural activity pattern reinstatement.

When encountering unexpected event changes, memories of relevant past experiences must be updated to form new representations. Current models of memory updating propose that people must first generate memory-based predictions to detect and register that features of the environment have changed, then encode the new event features and integrate them with relevant memories of past experiences to form configural memory representations. Each of these steps may be impaired in older adults.

Reminders of Everyday Misinformation Statements Can Enhance Memory for and Beliefs in Corrections of Those Statements in the Short Term.

Fake-news exposure can cause misinformation to be mistakenly remembered and believed. In two experiments (s = 96), we examined whether reminders of misinformation could improve memory for and beliefs in corrections. Subjects read factual statements and misinformation statements taken from news websites and then read statements that corrected the misinformation.