Month: June 2024

Congratulations to Dr. Karen Sasmita, Sahib Kahlia, Jacqueline Kim, and Siddiq Nanabawa for completing your degrees!!

How attention influence memory encoding? In Jackie Kim’s Honors Biology Thesis (co-advised with Dr. Adam Broitman), she investigated this question by examining components of scalp EEG associated with external information processing and successful memory encoding. One such component, gamma band power, is typically greater early in an encoding task (like one that asks participants to remember words in a list so they can later recall them) than later in an encoding task (the gamma primacy effect). Jackie’s work demonstrated that the gamma primacy effect was reduced under dual-task relative to single task performance. Congratulations Jackie!

Karen Sasmita successfully defended her dissertation, titled “Investigating the dynamics of information processing during naturalistic perception and encoding”. Karen’s research utilized behavior, neuroimaging, and EEG to investigate how people utilize external and internal sources of information to segment commercial film into meaningful events for memory. Karen is returning to Singapore later this summer and we will miss her insights and other contributions to the lab. Congrats Karen!

Changes in other’s goals may play a significant role in how people structure everyday experiences. When we see a partner put their book down and then walk to a cupboard we may identify a new event. However, most research demonstrating a relationship between goals and event segmentation use trained experimenters to identify goal changes. But, are people generally sensitive to goal changes as they watch other’s activities during naturalistic perception? And, do the goal changes they identify correspond to event boundaries?  In a new paper published in Memory & Cognition (“People can reliably detect action changes and goal changes during naturalistic perception”), Xing Su found that untrained observers are able to reliably identify goal and action changes in everyday events, that the actions they identify are nested within goals, and that goal and action changes contribute to segmentation above and beyond changes in visual motion and object interactions. Xing’s work demonstrates that people can track changes in relatively abstract features of other’s activities and that they may use this information to structure naturalistic experiences.

Past experiences are not usually recalled in a random order. Instead, items and events that were encountered at similar times tend to be recalled together, potentially reflecting the integration of a ‘temporal context’ signal in episodic memory. Though time appears to play an important role in episodic memory, there has been little work on whether selectively attending to specific moments in time impacts the degree to which temporal context contributes to episodic memory. In a new paper published in Memory & Cognition, Adam Broitman combined a target detection task with a verbal free recall paradigm and examined the impact of target detection on the order in which the words were recalled. Replicating the attentional boost effect, Adam found that words that were paired with a target during encoding were more likely to be subsequently recalled. He also found that target-paired words were more likely to be recalled first, suggesting increased accessibility during recall. However, there were no other effects of target detection on recall order. While temporal selection appears to facilitate encoding, these benefits do not extend to temporal context.