Tracking performance at the crossroads of perception and memory
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Date
2013-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
One of the most robust effects in memory is the spacing effect--memory is improved for
repeated stimuli separated by intervening items (spaced encoding) relative to immediate stimulus
repetitions (massed encoding). Because there are individual differences in working memory
capacity (the number of items a person is able to attend to simultaneously) we sought to define
the relationship between the spacing effect and working memory. We worked under the
hypothesis that the spacing effect works through a mechanism known as repetition attenuation—
this is a reduction in processing for repeated items. When other items intervene in between
repetitions, the amount of processing approaches baseline as a function of spacing. Studies have
shown that as the combined amount of processing for the item presentations during the test phase
increases, recognition memory improves. To test the theory that the spacing effect is due to
differences in perceptual processing of repeated items, we designed a novel experiment that
includes three spaced conditions and a massed condition. Famous and unfamiliar human faces
were used as stimuli. We administered a measure of working memory capacity called the
“Ospan” (operation span), and we predicted a direct relationship between o-span and memory
performance, such that individuals with larger working memory capacities would show the
greatest memory performance in the ‘long’ spacing condition. We found significant main effects
of spacing and stimulus familiarity for recognition performance and study phase priming, which
is a correlate of repetition attenuation.
Description
Honorable Mention at Denman Undergraduate Research Forum
Keywords
memory, familiar, repeated, context, faces