Memory Bias Research Articles

Predictive processing: Is the future just a memory?

Predictive processing seems like a radical departure from traditional theories of information processing in the brain, but a broader view of predictions highlights many similarities with standard frameworks. Predictive processing is memory and competitive bias in a new outlook-and we should use this correspondence to advance research on both fronts.

Parental (non-)pain attending verbalizations moderate the relationship between child attention and memory bias for pain.

Children's negatively biased pain-related memories (i.e. recalling pain as being more intense or fearful than initially reported) have been recognized as a key factor in explaining child pain development. While mechanisms underlying children's pain memory development remain poorly understood, attention biases and parent language have been implicated in conceptual models. This study examined the association between child pain-related attention and memory biases and the moderating role of parental pain and non-pain attending verbalizations. Participants were 51 school children and one of their parents. Probability of initial fixation and gaze duration to pain were assessed using eye tracking methodology. Children performed a cold pressor task (CPT) and reported on experienced pain intensity and pain-related fear. A 3-minute parent-child interaction upon CPT completion allowed measurement of parental pain and non-pain attending verbalizations. Children's pain-related memories were elicited 2weeks later. Findings indicated that the relationship between maintained attention to pain and fear memory bias was moderated by parental non-pain attending verbalizations such that higher gaze duration bias was positively associated with fear memory bias but only among children whose parents demonstrated low levels of non-pain attending verbalizations. The opposite pattern was observed for children whose parents showed high levels of non-pain attending verbalizations. No such effects were observed for child initial attention bias to pain, memory bias for pain and parental pain attending verbalizations. Findings highlight the importance of parental and child pain-related variables as well as their interaction in understanding negatively biased pain-related memories. This study on child pain memories is the first to highlight that characteristics of the social context, such as parental (non-)pain-related verbalizations, as well as factors related to the intra-individual experience of pain, such as child attention bias to pain, should be studied jointly, as they interact with each other in their effect on the emergence of negatively biased memories of painful events.

Sex Differences in Work-Stress Memory Bias and Stress Hormones.

Mental health problems related to chronic stress in workers appear to be sex-specific. Psychosocial factors related to work–life balance partly explain these sex differences. In addition, physiological markers of stress can provide critical information on the mechanisms explaining how chronic stress gets “under the skull” to increase vulnerability to mental health disorders in working men and women. Stress hormones access the brain and modulate attentional and memory process in favor of threatening information. In the present study, we tested whether male and female workers present a memory bias towards work-stress related information, and whether this bias is associated with concentrations of stress hormones in reactivity to a laboratory stressor (reactive levels) and samples taken in participants’ workday (diurnal levels). In total, 201 participants (144 women) aged between 18 and 72 years underwent immediate and delayed recall tasks with a 24-word list, split as a function of valence (work-stress, positive, neutral). Participants were exposed to a psychosocial stressor in between recalls. Reactivity to stress was measured with saliva samples before and after the stressor. Diurnal cortisol was also measured with five saliva samples a day, during 2 workdays. Our exploratory results showed that men presented greater cortisol reactivity to stress than women, while women recalled more positive and neutral words than men. No sex difference was detected on the recall of work-stress words, before or after exposure to stress. These results do not support the hypothesis of a sex-specific cognitive bias as an explanatory factor for sex differences in stress-related mental health disorders in healthy male and female workers. However, it is possible that such a work-stress bias is present in individuals who have developed a mental-health disorder related to workplace stress or who have had one in the recent past. Consequently, future studies could use our stress memory bias task to assess this and other hypotheses in diverse working populations.

Blessedly forgetful and blissfully unaware: a positivity bias in memory for (re)constructions of imagined past and future events

ABSTRACT People frequently consider the alternatives of the events that can happen in the future and of the events that already happened in the past in everyday life. The current study investigates the effects of engaging in imagination of hypothetical future (Experiment 1) and past (Experiment 2) events on memory and metamemory. We demonstrate, across two experiments, that imagination of positive future and positive past events yielded greater memory performance than negative events, as well as receiving higher vividness and plausibility ratings. In addition, simulation of a negative event occurring positively in the future or having occurred positively in the past produced higher memory performance, compared to simulation of a positive event occurring / having occurred negatively. However, participants’ predictions for their subsequent memory performance did not reflect their increased tendency to remember positive or could-be / could-have-been positive events neither for future nor past reconstructions. These findings are interpreted in the framework of positivity bias which suggests that people have a tendency towards positivity when simulating future events; and we extend this positivity bias to reconstructions of the hypothetical past events as well.

The perceptual relevance of balance, evenness, and entropy in musical rhythms

There is an uncountable number of different ways of characterizing almost any given real-world stimulus. This necessitates finding stimulus features that are perceptually relevant – that is, they have distinct and independent effects on the perception and cognition of the stimulus. Here, we provide a theoretical framework for empirically testing the perceptual relevance of stimulus features through their association with recognition, memory bias, and æsthetic evaluation. We deploy this framework in the auditory domain to explore the perceptual relevance of three recently developed mathematical characterizations of periodic temporal patterns: balance, evenness, and interonset interval entropy. By modelling recognition responses and liking ratings from 177 participants listening to a total of 1252 different musical rhythms, we obtain very strong evidence that all three features have distinct effects on the memory for, and the liking of, musical rhythms. Interonset interval entropy is a measure of the unpredictability of a rhythm derived from the distribution of its durations. Balance and evenness are both obtained from the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of periodic patterns represented as points on the unit circle, and we introduce a teleological explanation for their perceptual relevance: the DFT coefficients representing balance and evenness are relatively robust to small random temporal perturbations and hence are coherent in noisy environments. This theory suggests further research to explore the meaning and relevance of robust coefficients such as these to the perception of patterns that are periodic in time and, possibly, space.

Evaluating the Association of High Trait Anxiety With a Bias in Familiarity-Based Recognition of Emotional Stimuli

Abstract. In the past decades the role of cognitive biases as maintaining factors of anxiety has been widely researched. This theoretical framework assumes that vulnerability self-referential thoughts promote a hyper-vigilant mode of processing environmental stimuli. In this mode, threatening information increases attentional capture and therefore encoding and retrieval of such stimuli is enhanced. Although this attentional bias has been confirmed, the evidence concerning the memory bias is contradictory. Our hypothesis is that the bias in memory is expressed through the pattern of recognition. Particularly, the aim of this study was to evaluate the association of anxiety with familiarity, a deficient form of recognition which consists only in the identification of the item without retrieval of contextual information. Two groups of 17 participants with low and high anxiety levels performed an experimental task of visual recognition memory, using neutral, positive, and negative pictures. The experiment had two test phases, with a 24-hour interval, to evaluate possible effects of consolidation. The pattern of recognition was measured, behaviorally (through an independent Remember/Know paradigm) and through event-related potentials (ERP). Participants with higher levels of anxiety developed a bias in recognition of arousing stimuli (positive and negative) compared with the control group. This bias was observed behaviorally through an increase of familiarity-based recognition, and was associated with a positive modulation of a right parietal late positive component (LPC) at approximately 600 ms of latency. Participants with higher levels of anxiety are capable of recognizing arousing stimuli but lack efficiency in retrieving past contextual information compared to lower level anxiety participants. A recognition bias can be the first step in cognitive distortions that generate anxiety. This is, to our knowledge, the first study to explore the association of anxiety with familiarity-based recognition, using an independent Remember/Know paradigm combined with electrophysiological data. Further studies with bigger samples and more recording channels are needed to confirm the electrophysiological findings.

Testing competing claims about overclaiming

Overclaiming has been described as people's tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities in general and their knowledge in particular. We discuss four different perspectives on the phenomenon of overclaiming that have been proposed in the research literature: Overclaiming as a result of a) self-enhancement tendencies, b) as a cognitive bias (e.g., hindsight bias, memory bias), c) as proxy for cognitive abilities, and d) as sign of creative engagement. Moreover, we discuss two different scoring methods for an OCQ (signal detection theory vs. familiarity ratings). To distinguish between the different viewpoints of what overclaiming is, we juxtaposed overclaiming, as indicated by claiming familiarity with non-existent terms, with fluid and crystallized intelligence, self-reported knowledge, creativity, faking ability, and personality. Overclaiming was measured with a newly comprised overclaiming questionnaire. Results of several latent variable analyses based upon a multivariate study with 298 participants were: First, overclaiming is neither predicted by honesty-humility nor faking ability and therefore reflects something different than mere self-enhancement tendencies. Second, overclaiming is not predicted by crystallized intelligence, but is highly predictive of self-reported knowledge and, thus, not suitable as an index or a proxy for cognitive abilities. Finally, overclaiming is neither related to divergent thinking and originality, and only moderately predicted by self-reported openness creativity from the HEXACO which means that overclaiming does not reflect creative ability. In sum, our results favor an interpretation of overclaiming as a phenomenon that requires more than self-enhancement motivation, in contrast to the claim that was initially proposed in the literature.

Interplay between persistent activity and activity-silent dynamics in the prefrontal cortex underlies serial biases in working memory.

Persistent neuronal spiking has long been considered the mechanism underlying working memory, but recent proposals argue for alternative, “activity-silent” substrates. Using monkey and human electrophysiology, we show here that attractor dynamics that control neural spiking during mnemonic periods interact with activity-silent mechanisms in PFC. This interaction allows memory reactivations, which enhance serial biases in spatial working memory. Stimulus information was not decodable between trials, but remained present in activity-silent traces inferred from spiking synchrony in PFC. Just prior to the new stimulus, this latent trace was reignited into activity that recapitulated the previous stimulus representation. Importantly, the reactivation strength correlated with the strength of serial biases in both monkeys and humans, as predicted by a computational model integrating activity-based and activity-silent mechanisms. Finally, single-pulse TMS applied to the human prefrontal cortex between successive trials enhanced serial biases, demonstrating the causal role of prefrontal reactivations in determining working memory behavior.

Beyond Clinical Outcomes: Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Favor Attentional and Memory Control Abilities for Trauma-Related Words.

Memory alterations and biases are core features of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Although a large number of studies have investigated memory biases associated with PTSS, some inconsistencies remain regarding the nature of the mechanisms behind the threat-related biases observed in prior findings. The present study explored the extent to which inhibitory deficits, both for automatic and controlled processes, can account for these biases. Participants (N = 64) took part in a remember/know recognition procedure for positive, neutral, negative, and trauma-related words associated with negative priming and directed forgetting encoding. Half of the participants had high levels of PTSS (i.e., PCL-5 score > 40) and half had low levels (i.e., total PCL-5 score < 20). As both negative priming and directed forgetting effects are posited to depend on inhibitory abilities, we expected these effects to be absent for trauma-related words in participants with more severe PTSS. Replicating classic memory biases, participants with high levels of PTSS produced more "remember" recognition responses for trauma-related words, ηp 2 = .10. However, contrary to our expectations, directed forgetting, ηp 2 = .26; and negative priming effects were observed for trauma-related words but not for words of other valences, ηp 2 = .07 and .06, respectively. Hence, rather than the expected inhibitory deficits, our results suggest that PTSS preserve the ability to inhibit trauma-related information in both attentional and memory processes. As it appears to occur at the expense of other information, this preserved cognitive functioning for trauma-related stimuli is discussed with regard to resource reallocation theories.

Autologous fat grafting efficacy in treating PostMastectomy pain syndrome: A prospective multicenter trial of two Senonetwork Italia breast centers.

Postmastectomy pain syndrome (PMPS) represents a common complication following breast surgery defined as a chronic neuropathic pain located in the front of the chest, in the axilla and in the upper arm that for more than 3months after surgery. Several medications prove to be ineffective while autologous fat grafting revealed to be an innovative solution in the treatment of neuropathic pain syndromes based on retrospective studies. For this reason, we performed a prospective multicenter trial to reduce the memory bias and further increase the evidence of the results. From February 2018 to March 2019, 37 female patients aged between 18 and 80years, underwent mastectomy or quadrantectomy with pathologic scarring and chronic persistent neuropathic pain, compatible with PMPS, are been included in the study and treated with autologous fat grafting. During the enrollment phase, patients were asked to estimate pain using the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and POSAS questionnaire in order to evaluate scar outcomes. The VAS scale, starting from 6.9 (1.3), decreased in the first month by 3.10 (1.59), continuing to fall by 0.83 (1.60) to 3months and by 0.39 (2.09) at 6months. Statistical analysis showed a significant reduction after 1month (P<.0001) and 3months (P<.005). All POSAS grades documented a statistically significant reduction (P<.0001) of the scores by both observers and patients. We observed that no significant association was found between age, BMI, menopausal status of patients, days from oncologic surgery to autologous fat grafting and reduction of VAS values over time while both smoking and axillary dissection were observed as the main factor significantly associated with a reduced clinical efficacy (respectively, P=.0227 and P=.0066). Our prospective multicenter trial confirms the efficacy of fat grafting in the treatment of PMPS based on the principle of regenerative medicine with a satisfactory response in terms of pain reduction and improvement of the quality of the treated tissues. Clinical questionnaires show that the cicatricial areas improve in terms of color, thickness, skin pliability, and surface irregularities. Regenerative effect is based also on the adoption of needles. The combined effect of fat grafting and needles determines a clinical full response.

Psychometric Properties of the Verbal Affective Memory Test-26 and Evaluation of Affective Biases in Major Depressive Disorder.

We developed the Verbal Affective Memory Test-26 (VAMT-26), a computerized test to assess verbal memory, as an improvement of the Verbal Affective Memory Test-24 (VAMT-24). Here, we psychometrically evaluate the VAMT-26 in 182 healthy controls, examine 1-month test–retest stability in 48 healthy controls, and examine whether 87 antidepressant-free patients diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) tested with VAMT-26 differed in affective memory biases from 335 healthy controls tested with VAMT24/26. We also examine whether affective memory biases are associated with depressive symptoms across the patients and healthy controls. VAMT-26 showed good psychometric properties. Age, sex, and IQ, but not education, influenced VAMT-26 scores. VAMT-26 scores converged satisfactorily with scores on a test associated with non-affective verbal memory. Test–retest analyses showed a learning effect and a r ≥ 0.0.8, corresponding to a typical variation of 10% in recalled words from first to second test. Patients tended to remember more negative words relative to positive words compared to healthy controls at borderline significance (p = 0.06), and affective memory biases were negatively associated with depressive symptoms across the two groups at borderline significance (p = 0.07), however, the effect sizes were small. Future studies are needed to address whether VAMT-26 can be used to distinguish between depression subtypes in patients with MDD. As a verbal memory test, VAMT-26 is a well validated neuropsychological test and we recommend it to be used in Danish and international studies on affective memory.

Visual working memory enhances target discrimination accuracy with single-item displays.

The maintenance of information in visual working memory has been shown to bias the concurrent processing in favor of matching visual input. The present study aimed to examine whether this bias can act at an early stage of processing to enhance target feature perception in single-item displays. Participants were sequentially presented with two distinct colored stimuli as memory samples and a retro-cue indicating which of the two samples should be maintained for subsequent memory test. During the retention interval, they had to discriminate the gap orientation of a Landolt target presented through a single visual stimulus that could match one or neither of the two samples. Across two experiments, we consistently found that discrimination performance was more accurate when the Landolt target was situated within a stimulus that matched the sample being retained in visual working memory, as compared with when the target was not. This effect cannot be attributed to the mechanism of passive priming, because we failed to observe priming effects when the stimulus containing the target matched the sample that was retro-cued to be irrelevant to the working memory task, as compared to when the stimulus matched neither sample. Given the fact that target stimuli were presented in single-item displays wherein external noise was precluded, the present findings demonstrate that the working memory bias of visual attention operating in the absence of stimulus competition facilitates early perceptual processing at the attended location via signal enhancement.

P0194UNRAVELING FATIGUE IN HAEMODIALYSIS PATIENTS: A PLEA FOR THE USE OF MOBILE HEALTH EXPERIENCE SAMPLING METHODOLOGY

Abstract Background and Aims Fatigue is one of the most prioritized outcomes among haemodialyis (HD) patients with great impact on health-related quality of life. However, evidence-based therapies are lacking. A better understanding of fatigue symptoms and related behavioral, social and psychological factors in HD patients is of primary importance. Conventionally used fatigue measurement instruments, such as the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), only provide a general picture of fatigue severity and are prone to memory bias due to their retrospective nature. However, they cannot provide detailed insight in diurnal variations in fatigue and related factors in daily life. The Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) overcomes these limitations by repeated “real-time” assessments in patients’ natural environments using digital questionnaires. The aims of this study were (i) to gain in-depth understanding of HD patients’ diurnal fatigue patterns and related variables using a mobile Health (mHealth) ESM application, (ii) to better understand the nature of their interrelationships, and (iii) to explore the relationship between real-time experience of fatigue and its retrospective assessment. Method Forty chronic HD patients used the mHealth ESM application for seven consecutive days to assess momentary fatigue and potentially related variables, including daily activities, self-reported physical activity, social company, location and mood patterns. In addition, patients retrospectively evaluated their fatigue experience over the preceding day and week by means of end-of-day, and end-of-week questionnaires and the FSS. Results Multilevel regression analyses of momentary observations (N=1778) revealed that fatigue varied between and within individuals (Fig.1). Fatigue was significantly related to type of daily activity and mood. Time-lagged analyses showed that HD treatment predicted higher fatigue scores at a later time point, β = 0.22, p = 0.013. Interestingly, higher momentary fatigue also significantly predicted more depressed feelings at a later time point, β = 0.05, p = 0.019, but not the other way around. Retrospective evaluation of fatigue experience over the preceding week was significantly higher than the average of momentary fatigue scores, t(38) = 3.54, p = 0.001. The FSS correlated moderately with the average of momentary fatigue scores, r = 0.63. Conclusion This study demonstrates diurnal variability of fatigue in chronic HD patients. It also corroborates a previous result from our research group showing that fatigue increases as a response to HD treatment (i.e. post-dialysis fatigue) and should, at least partially, be distinguished from a more general fatigue experience. Furthermore, our findings may suggest that depressed mood is secondary to fatigue in HD patients given their temporal relationship. Finally, retrospective fatigue assessment led to overestimation of the real-time fatigue experience. ESM offers novel insights in fatigue in HD patients by capturing informative symptom variability in the flow of daily life, which is not provided by conventional fatigue measures. Moreover, ESM provides personalized information about fatigue symptoms and their relationship with other variables in daily life, paving the way towards personalized interventions for HD patients.

Negative memory bias as a transdiagnostic cognitive marker for depression symptom severity

BackgroundNegative memory bias is a strong risk factor for the development and maintenance of depression. Recent evidence also found negative memory bias in other mental disorders. Here, we aim to: 1) assess the presence and strength of negative memory bias in a range of (comorbid) mental disorders, 2) investigate which disorder-specific symptoms are associated with negative memory bias, and 3) test whether negative memory bias might be a transdiagnostic mechanism. MethodsNegative memory bias was measured in patients with at least one diagnosis of a stress-related disorder (n = 86), a neurodevelopmental disorder (n = 53), or both (n = 68), and 51 controls. Depression, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and autism spectrum disorder symptom severity was assessed using questionnaires. Groups were compared on negative memory bias and the associations between negative memory bias and symptom severity were made using linear regression models. ResultsAll patient groups showed stronger negative memory bias than the controls. Negative memory bias was individually associated with all symptom severity indices, but when added into a single model, only the association with depressive symptom severity remained. This persisted after controlling for diagnostic group. LimitationsDue to the cross-sectional sectional study design, we could only look at the associations between negative memory bias and disorder-specific symptoms and not at the direction of the effects. ConclusionsNegative memory bias is characteristic of a depressotypic processing style and present in different mental disorders. It might play a mechanistic role in the development of (subclinical) co-occurrence between mental disorders.

Attention and memory biases for aggressive information in college students with fragile high self-esteem.

In this study, we examined attention and memory biases for aggressive information in two groups of college students. Individuals with fragile high self-esteem (n=30) and individuals with secure high self-esteem (n=30) first performed a dot-probe task investigating attention bias, followed by a memory task. Incidental free recall of words presented in the memory task was then completed to assess memory bias. Results revealed that individuals with fragile high self-esteem exhibited significant attention and memory biases for aggressive words compared with secure high self-esteem individuals. Attention bias for aggressive words was positively correlated with memory bias in individuals with fragile high self-esteem, but no correlation was found for individuals with secure high self-esteem. These findings suggest that individuals with fragile high self-esteem selectively attend to and remember aggression-related information. They may process information in ways that are congruent with an aggression-related schema. This study reveals the aggressive cognitive processes of individuals with fragile high self-esteem, which may be related to aggression.

0096 Future-Relevant Information is Enhanced After Sleep Despite Emotional Salience of Stimuli

Abstract Introduction A substantial literature supports that sleep biases memory consolidation and retrieval for emotionally-salient stimuli. A smaller, yet growing, literature supports that information deemed relevant to future events may also be favored by sleep consolidation processes. However, it is unclear whether both emotion and predictability would act together to bias sleep-dependent memory formation. Here, we utilized a directed forgetting paradigm with negative and neutral word pairs to examine this open question. Methods Sixty young and healthy adults were exposed to word pair stimuli before a polysomnographically-recorded nap. Before the nap, participants were instructed to remember half of the word pairs presented for a later test, and for the other half of word pairs, participants were told to forget them as there would not be a test on them later. Additionally, during encoding, half of the subjects in the sample were exposed to negative valenced, high arousal word pairs while the other half were exposed to neutral, low arousal word pairs. After the nap, subjects were tested on all word pairs presented, regardless of previous instruction. This also included a set of novel word pairs to which participants had not been previously exposed. Results A series of 2x2 mixed measures ANOVAs revealed that individuals had better accuracy (p&amp;lt;.001) and fewer misses (p&amp;lt;.001) for the words they were told to remember compared to those they were instructed to forget. Additionally, participants had relatively few false alarms to novel stimuli, 7.14 times, on average (SD=6.10), out of a possible 50 word pairs. Importantly, contrary to predictions, post-nap performance was not dependent on the word pair valence (interaction p’s&amp;gt;.70). No correlations between sleep stages and memory emerged. Conclusion These findings suggest that predictability of future events may be a relevant catalyst for sleep-related memory processing. Support This work was supported by an Office of Naval Research Young Investigators Award to Sara Mednick and a National Institutes of Mental Health Training grant to Lauren Whitehurst T32MH019391.

Understanding attention, memory and social biases in fragile X syndrome: Going below the surface with a multi-method approach

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is characterised by atypical social behaviours, such as gaze aversion. However, it remains unclear whether, or if so how, these behaviours affect cognitive processing and influence memory. We asked children with FXS (N = 16) and typically developing children (TD; N = 46) to explore naturalistic scenes containing social and non-social salient items unrelated to their task at hand (searching for a simple target object). We also assessed children’s memory for target locations. We complemented behavioural responses with eye-tracking data for the subset of participants who managed to comply with calibration and the demands of the experimental testing session (6 children with FXS and 43 TD children). Children with FXS performed well at the experimental task, and showed similar accuracy and speed in locating targets in natural scenes to children of equivalent verbal abilities. They also learned target locations over blocks, but their memory of target locations was not as precise as that of comparison children. In addition, children with FXS initially directed few first looks to salient social items within the scenes, but these looks increased over blocks. Like TD children, children with FXS also dwelled gaze upon social items while recalling target locations from memory. Individual differences in everyday social characteristics also related to gaze and behavioural measures. In conclusion, experimental approaches can highlight cognitive underpinnings of atypical social behaviour in FXS, pinpointing both similarities and differences to TD individuals.

Incidental learning of list membership is affected by serial position in the list

ABSTRACTCowan, Donnell, and Saults [(2013). A list-length constraint on incidental item-to-item associations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20, 1253–1258] examined incidental memory of whether two words had occurred in the same list or different lists, after the lists had been presented with an orienting task that did not require memorisation. Performance was superior for 3-word lists compared to 6- or 9-word lists, with memory for the longer lists near chance levels. Here we re-examine this phenomenon with methodological modifications to ensure that learning was incidental: we removed potential clues that a memory test would follow, eliminated trials with special mnemonic cues related to the orienting task, eliminated participants who suspected a memory test according to a post-experimental questionnaire, used signal detection measures to distinguish between memory sensitivity and bias, and tested list length with the relative serial position controlled. Incidental memory formed primarily for the most recent part of each list, an effect that was stronger than that of list length. The new evidence helps to constrain theories about the relation between working memory and incidental learning. A capacity-limited approach to the incidental-learning process still is possible but must be modified compared to Cowan et al., and the evidence is favourable to other theoretical approaches as well.

Foraging minds in modern environments: High-calorie and savory-taste biases in human food spatial memory

Human memory may show sensitivity to content that carried fitness-relevance throughout evolutionary history. We investigated whether biases in human food spatial memory exist and influence the eating behavior of individuals within the modern food environment. In two lab studies with distinct samples of 88 participants, individuals had to re-locate foods on a map in a computer-based spatial memory task using visual (Study 1) or olfactory (Study 2) cues that signaled sweet and savory high- and low-calorie foods. Individuals consistently displayed an enhanced memory for locations of high-calorie and savory-tasting foods – regardless of hedonic evaluations, personal experiences with foods, or the time taken to encode food locations. However, we did not find any clear effects of the high-calorie or savory-taste bias in food spatial memory on eating behavior. Findings highlight that content matters deeply for the faculty of human food spatial memory and indicate an implicit cognitive system presumably attuned to ancestral priorities of optimal foraging.

"False memories, false preferences: Flexible retrieval mechanisms supporting successful inference bias novel decisions." Correction to Carpenter and Schacter (2018).

Reports an error in "False memories, false preferences: Flexible retrieval mechanisms supporting successful inference bias novel decisions" by Alexis C. Carpenter and Daniel L. Schacter (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2018[Jul], Vol 147[7], 988-1004). In the article the incorrect version of Figure 4 was published. The correct Figure 4 is provided in the erratum. The online version of this article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2018-05307-001.) Prior research suggests that episodic memory can guide value-based decisions when single episodes are encoded in relation to the specific reward-context in which they were experienced. The current experiments examine the role that a flexible recombination-related retrieval mechanism that allows one to link together distinct events plays in the misattribution of specific reward-contexts across distinct episodes. To determine whether the same recombination-related retrieval mechanism supports both successful inference and transfer of reward-context across episodes, we developed a modified version of an associative inference paradigm in which participants encoded overlapping associations (AB, BC) that could later be linked to support inferential retrieval (AC), where one element ("A") was tied to reward. Our key experimental manipulation concerned whether value memory (Experiments 1 and 2) or decision bias tests (Experiment 3) were probed before or after the associative inference test, thereby allowing us to assess whether false value transfer and decision bias scores increased after as compared to before successful versus unsuccessful inference. Results revealed that participants more frequently misattributed the specific reward-context ("A") to unrewarded items ("C;" Experiments 1 and 2) and showed higher decision bias scores when asked to choose between two previously unrewarded items ("C;" Experiment 3) for successful compared with unsuccessful inference, but only when the value memory and decision bias tests were given after the associative inference test. These results suggest that a recombination-related retrieval mechanism that supports successful inference also contributes to the misattribution of reward-context in memory and further biases participants' novel value-based decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).