Presenter(s): Rennie Kendrick
Faculty Mentor(s): Dasa Zeithamova & Caitlin Bowman
Poster 119
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
Memory allows us to link across multiple experiences to derive new information. For example, if we see a person, person 1, walking a Dalmatian, and later see another person, person 2, walking the same Dalmatian, we may infer that person 1 and 2 live in the same household. This linking of experiences to derive new information is called associative inference, and my research asks which conditions lead to the best associative inference. Participants are trained and tested on object pairs that each share an object in common with another pair. Half of the participants see object pairs in blocked format and the other half see the object pairs in interleaved format. In the blocked condition, participants have strongly established prior knowledge before encountering overlapping new information. In the interleaved condition, participants encounter a new overlapping episode before the first is strongly established. For the associative inference test, participants must infer that two objects that were never directly paired together, but paired with the same object, are indirectly related. I found that participants in the blocked condition performed significantly better on associative inference and directly-paired object tests compared to interleaved condition participants. Thus, strong memory for the first episode before encountering the second, overlapping episode enhanced associative inference ability and memory for both individual episodes. One possibility for this effect is that strongly established prior knowledge prevents interference from overlapping, but distinct episodes. Further investigation into the effect of blocked versus interleaved training on learning could lead to enhanced teaching methods.