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An ERP Study of Competitive Memory Retrieval in a Lateralized Auditory Task

Persson, Sandra LU (2020) PSYP01 20191
Department of Psychology
Abstract
Selectively retrieving memories can lead to forgetting of related, but irrelevant memories. The forgetting of competing memories has been seen in several behavioral studies, but neural evidence of the process underlying this finding are scarce. One hypothesis is that the brain handles competition at retrieval by inhibition of the competing items to facilitate target retrieval. The effect of this inhibition at retrieval is the later forgetting. The present study aimed at studying the temporal unfolding of competitive memory retrieval. To this end, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while participants engaged in a selective retrieval task. The task consisted of encoding a set of words and later practice retrieval of a subset of... (More)
Selectively retrieving memories can lead to forgetting of related, but irrelevant memories. The forgetting of competing memories has been seen in several behavioral studies, but neural evidence of the process underlying this finding are scarce. One hypothesis is that the brain handles competition at retrieval by inhibition of the competing items to facilitate target retrieval. The effect of this inhibition at retrieval is the later forgetting. The present study aimed at studying the temporal unfolding of competitive memory retrieval. To this end, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while participants engaged in a selective retrieval task. The task consisted of encoding a set of words and later practice retrieval of a subset of them. All words were tested in a final phase. In an attempt to spatially separate the activation of target words and competing words they were presented to different ears during encoding. The selective retrieval was repeated in three rounds to study an increase or decrease in the ERPs and to relate this to the behavioral measures. Replicating previous findings, a greater forgetting of competitors as compared to baseline items were seen in the final test. Significant differences in the ERPs between the retrieval rounds were found but the magnitude of the difference did not correlate with later forgetting. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed. (Less)
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author
Persson, Sandra LU
supervisor
organization
course
PSYP01 20191
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
retrieval-induced forgetting, memory reactivation, inhibition, EEG, ERP, auditory stimuli
language
English
id
9007988
date added to LUP
2020-05-27 07:22:46
date last changed
2020-05-27 07:22:46
@misc{9007988,
  abstract     = {{Selectively retrieving memories can lead to forgetting of related, but irrelevant memories. The forgetting of competing memories has been seen in several behavioral studies, but neural evidence of the process underlying this finding are scarce. One hypothesis is that the brain handles competition at retrieval by inhibition of the competing items to facilitate target retrieval. The effect of this inhibition at retrieval is the later forgetting. The present study aimed at studying the temporal unfolding of competitive memory retrieval. To this end, event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while participants engaged in a selective retrieval task. The task consisted of encoding a set of words and later practice retrieval of a subset of them. All words were tested in a final phase. In an attempt to spatially separate the activation of target words and competing words they were presented to different ears during encoding. The selective retrieval was repeated in three rounds to study an increase or decrease in the ERPs and to relate this to the behavioral measures. Replicating previous findings, a greater forgetting of competitors as compared to baseline items were seen in the final test. Significant differences in the ERPs between the retrieval rounds were found but the magnitude of the difference did not correlate with later forgetting. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed.}},
  author       = {{Persson, Sandra}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{An ERP Study of Competitive Memory Retrieval in a Lateralized Auditory Task}},
  year         = {{2020}},
}