Memory researchers discuss their work at international event

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Our research students a really going digging down into key psychological concepts so we asked them for a little bit more about their work.

Paul’s study sought to distinguish two possible theoretical accounts for this relationship (executive attention and binding) by manipulating their demands in the same task. The results indicating that increasing the attentional demand of a working memory task (i.e., trying to remember colours of text that are either neutral or incongruent with the presented text, e.g. remembering red when it is presented as XXXX or BLUE, respectively) more strongly affected accurate recall of the colours than correct rejection of lures that signify binding errors (i.e., misremembering red in a different context in the trial). Both of these measures were correlated with fluid intelligence, suggesting attention and binding may have distinct roles in the working memory-intelligence relationship.

Although distraction is known to impair memory performance, studying information with distraction (as what occurs during a complex span task) improves long-term episodic memory compared to tasks without distraction (as what occurs during a simple span task), Charlotte’s project followed examined whether the way people immediately recall information from complex versus simple span changes this pattern. In general the findings showed that the effect was somewhat stronger when people had to recall information in its original serial order compared to freely recalling the information, suggesting that the presumed covert retrieval that participants do to maintain the information is cumulative in nature.