{"title":"Contextual familiarity rescues the cost of switching.","authors":"Lindsay I Rait, Vishnu P Murty, Sarah DuBrow","doi":"10.3758/s13423-023-02392-1","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Changes in context influence the way we form and structure memories. Yet, little is known about how qualitatively different types of context switches shape memory organization. The current experiments characterize how different features of context change influence the structure and organization of free recall. Participants completed a context switching paradigm in which we manipulated the rate of switches and prior experience with the contexts participants were switching between (repeated vs. novel). We measured free-recall performance and determined the extent to which participants organized items by the order in which they were encoded or the type of context with which they were originally presented. Across two experiments, we found and replicated that rapidly switching to novel, but not repeated contexts, impaired memory recall performance and biased memory towards a greater reliance on temporal information. Critically, we observed that these differences in performance may be due to distinctions in how participants organize their recalls when rapidly switching contexts. Results indicated that participants were less likely to only cluster their responses by the same context when the contexts were repeating at a high rate, as compared to when the contexts were novel. Overall, our findings support a model in which contextual familiarity rescues the costs associated with rapidly switching to new tasks or contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":20763,"journal":{"name":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Psychonomic Bulletin & Review","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02392-1","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2023/10/6 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Changes in context influence the way we form and structure memories. Yet, little is known about how qualitatively different types of context switches shape memory organization. The current experiments characterize how different features of context change influence the structure and organization of free recall. Participants completed a context switching paradigm in which we manipulated the rate of switches and prior experience with the contexts participants were switching between (repeated vs. novel). We measured free-recall performance and determined the extent to which participants organized items by the order in which they were encoded or the type of context with which they were originally presented. Across two experiments, we found and replicated that rapidly switching to novel, but not repeated contexts, impaired memory recall performance and biased memory towards a greater reliance on temporal information. Critically, we observed that these differences in performance may be due to distinctions in how participants organize their recalls when rapidly switching contexts. Results indicated that participants were less likely to only cluster their responses by the same context when the contexts were repeating at a high rate, as compared to when the contexts were novel. Overall, our findings support a model in which contextual familiarity rescues the costs associated with rapidly switching to new tasks or contexts.
期刊介绍:
The journal provides coverage spanning a broad spectrum of topics in all areas of experimental psychology. The journal is primarily dedicated to the publication of theory and review articles and brief reports of outstanding experimental work. Areas of coverage include cognitive psychology broadly construed, including but not limited to action, perception, & attention, language, learning & memory, reasoning & decision making, and social cognition. We welcome submissions that approach these issues from a variety of perspectives such as behavioral measurements, comparative psychology, development, evolutionary psychology, genetics, neuroscience, and quantitative/computational modeling. We particularly encourage integrative research that crosses traditional content and methodological boundaries.