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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.

Interested in events and naturalistic perception? What about attention? Or memory? Come check out our posters at Psychonomics Friday evening (11/17)!

Karen Sasmita, a graduate student, will present her work examining how functional connectivity of the hippocampus changes around event boundaries during naturalistic viewing.

Jacqueline Kim, an undergraduate honors student, will present her findings from analyses of EEG data that examined the effects of attentional manipulations on the gamma primacy effect (increased EEG spectral power in the gamma band at the beginning of a word list encoding).

The AMP Lab is happy to welcome Nickolas Paternoster as the newest graduate student to the lab. Nick plans to use computational models to investigate the locus coeruleus and attention. Welcome Nick!

Congratulations to all our Spring 2023 graduates, Dr. Adam Broitman, Lilyanna Gross, and John Rosero, for completing your degrees!!

In April, Adam Broitman successfully defended his dissertation, titled “Temporal Attention Modulates Episodic Encoding and EEG Subsequent Memory Effects.” His dissertation focused on the attentional boost effect and the degree to which target detection facilitates aspects of episodic memory using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Adam started a postdoctoral position, working with Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania. Congratulations Adam!

In everyday life, people often must adjust what they are doing after the situation they are in has changed. Previous work on the attentional boost effect suggests that memory encoding is enhanced at these times by a brief boost to perceptual processing known as temporal selection. However, we don’t yet know whether temporal selection boosts memory for the scene as a whole, or whether it depends on how much of the scene is attended. In a new paper titled “Diffusion Decision Modeling of Retrieval Following the Temporal Selection of Behaviorally Relevant Moments”, Turker & Swallow (2022) used drift diffusion modeling to show that memory for which elements appeared together in a scene, and where, is enhanced when they co-occur with pictures that require participants to press a button. Memory for the relationships between elements on the screen was enhanced despite its being irrelevant to the participant’s tasks, and was even stronger when participants were instructed to divide attention across more elements of the scene. This suggests that people better encode the situation they are currently in when they encounter events that require a response.