Presenter(s): Celina Maldonado—Psychology and Linguistics
Faculty Mentor(s): Lea Frank, Dasa Zeithamova
Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation
Memory serves two important functions: we must remember individual experiences (memory specificity) and we must be able to link across these experiences to form general concepts (generalization) . It is unclear, however, whether generalization and memory specificity are competing or complementary processes . One possibility is that individual memories are stored in detail and then generalized during retrieval . In this case, successful generalization relies on intact memory for the individual memories . Another possibility is that memories are linked to previous experiences during encoding, leading to some of the information of individual experiences being lost to support generalization . In this experiment, two tasks were used to study memory specificity and generalization . To investigate memory specificity, participants studied a series of colored objects . The test phase required participants to select the color of each object from a continuous color wheel, allowing us to measure how precisely they could remember the color-object pair . To measure generalization, participants studied face-scene pairings in which two faces were paired with a given scene (F1-S1, F2-S1), and one of the faces was also paired with a second scene (F2-S2) . Generalization was measured by how often participants linked the second face with the second scene (F2-S2) at test given the faces’ shared preference for the first scene . To understand the relationship between memory specificity and generalization, we correlated performance on the two independent tasks . If generalization relies on intact memory for individual experiences, then I predict performance on generalization and memory specificity will be positively correlated .