Behavioral Manipulation of the Consolidation of Specific and General Memory Traces

Poster Session B - Sunday, April 14, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Katelyn Cliver¹ (kate.cliver@drexel.edu), Alexa Tompary¹; ¹Drexel University

Memories are not a perfect snapshot of everyday life; they can be influenced, making them prone to distortions. Previous work has explained that newly formed, episodic memories can be integrated with prior semantic knowledge, causing a systematic distortion in their retrieval (Tompary & Thompson-Schill 2021). Here, we investigated whether consolidation mechanisms could be manipulated to prioritize the retention of specific episodic details or more general semantic information contained in individual memories. We developed a 1-back task as a post-encoding manipulation to cue the resolution of memory (i.e. specific or general) for participants to prioritize for consolidation, aiming to retroactively tag newly learned episodic memories, similar to past retroactive tagging manipulations (Patil et. al., 2016). Preliminary analyses suggest that the novel manipulation selectively impacts memory after a 24-hour delay. We found that memories for images with locations spatially consistent with category members were more precise than spatially inconsistent images, a replication of previous behavioral findings by Tompary and Thompson-Schill (2021), and that the precision of memories more congruent with prior knowledge was retained over a delay, consistent with prior work (Richter et. al, 2019, Tompary, Zhou, & Davachi 2020). Although these preliminary results appear to be promising, it is important to note that the findings were based on a sample of seven pilot participants (n = 7), and further work is necessary to probe the interactions between idiosyncratic details and semantic knowledge that comprise newly formed episodic memories during consolidation.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic