Increasing Retention Intervals Research Articles

Forget framing might involve the assumption of mastery, but probably does not activate the notion of forgetting.

Soliciting predictions about hypothetical memory performance (without having participants engage in a related memory task) is a simple way for researchers to examine people's metacognitive beliefs about how memory functions. Using this methodology, researchers can vary what information is provided as part of the scenario or how the memory prediction is framed to examine how such factors alter people's memory predictions. For example, Koriat, Bjork, Sheffer, and Bar (2004) found that participants would factor expected retention intervals into their memory predictions (worse performance over longer intervals) when they were asked to predict future forgetting, but not when they were asked to predict future remembering. In the present experiments, we examined the effects of forget framing on memory predictions and whether we indicated that the hypothetical learners had mastered the information before the retention interval began. Although we hypothesized that stating initial mastery might similarly activate participants' knowledge that memory should decline with longer retention intervals, in our experiments, neither the forget frame nor mastery information seemed to consistently trigger participants' beliefs about forgetting. Furthermore, participants' remember-framed predictions were higher when we indicated mastery than when we did not, but forget-framed predictions were not affected by the mastery information. Taken together, the present results suggest that the forget frame might involve the assumption of an initially high level of mastery but probably does not activate a "notion of forgetting" that alerts participants to the fact that memory declines over increasing retention intervals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Adaptive retrieval practice with multiple‐choice questions in the university classroom

AbstractRetrieval practice promotes retention more than restudying (i.e., the testing effect) and is applied to many educational settings. However, little research has investigated means to enhance this effect in educational settings. Theoretical accounts assume retrieval practice to be the most effective whenever retrieval is difficult but successful. Therefore, we developed a novel retrieval practice procedure, which adapts to learners' abilities and can be applied irrespective of learning content. This adaptive procedure aims to make retrieval gradually easier whenever students provide an incorrect answer. In a field experiment, students read book chapters as part of a weekly university course. In three consecutive weeks, they then practiced reading assignments by (a) adaptive testing, (b) non‐adaptive testing and (c) restudy. In Week 4, a surprise criterial test took place. Restudy outperformed both testing conditions, whereas adaptive testing performed equally well as non‐adaptive testing. However, exploratory analyses revealed that with increasing retention intervals, the superiority of restudy disappeared. Furthermore, whenever participants fully read the assignments and retention intervals increased, adaptive testing outperformed non‐adaptive testing. In sum, adaptive retrieval practice did not prove to be generally superior, but retention interval and students' preparation for class might be conditions rendering adaptive retrieval useful in educational settings.

Vestibular stimulation interferes with the dynamics of an internal representation of gravity.

The remembered vanishing location of a moving target has been found to be displaced downward in the direction of gravity (representational gravity) and more so with increasing retention intervals, suggesting that the visual spatial updating recruits an internal model of gravity. Despite being consistently linked with gravity, few inquiries have been made about the role of vestibular information in these trends. Previous experiments with static tilting of observers' bodies suggest that under conflicting cues between the idiotropic vector and vestibular signals, the dynamic drift in memory is reduced to a constant displacement along the body's main axis. The present experiment aims to replicate and extend these outcomes while keeping the observers' bodies unchanged in relation to physical gravity by varying the gravito-inertial acceleration using a short-radius centrifuge. Observers were shown, while accelerated to varying degrees, targets moving along several directions and were required to indicate the perceived vanishing location after a variable interval. Increases of the gravito-inertial force (up to 1.4G), orthogonal to the idiotropic vector, did not affect the direction of representational gravity, but significantly disrupted its time course. The role and functioning of an internal model of gravity for spatial perception and orientation are discussed in light of the results.

How Fast Do Objects Fall in Visual Memory? Uncovering the Temporal and Spatial Features of Representational Gravity

Visual memory for the spatial location where a moving target vanishes has been found to be systematically displaced downward in the direction of gravity. Moreover, it was recently reported that the magnitude of the downward error increases steadily with increasing retention intervals imposed after object’s offset and before observers are allowed to perform the spatial localization task, in a pattern where the remembered vanishing location drifts downward as if following a falling trajectory. This outcome was taken to reflect the dynamics of a representational model of earth’s gravity. The present study aims to establish the spatial and temporal features of this downward drift by taking into account the dynamics of the motor response. The obtained results show that the memory for the last location of the target drifts downward with time, thus replicating previous results. Moreover, the time taken for completion of the behavioural localization movements seems to add to the imposed retention intervals in determining the temporal frame during which the visual memory is updated. Overall, it is reported that the representation of spatial location drifts downward by about 3 pixels for each two-fold increase of time until response. The outcomes are discussed in relation to a predictive internal model of gravity which outputs an on-line spatial update of remembered objects’ location.

Do as I … Did! Long-term memory of imitative actions in dogs (Canis familiaris).

This study demonstrates long-term declarative memory of imitative actions in a non-human animal species. We tested 12 pet dogs for their ability to imitate human actions after retention intervals ranging from 1 to 24 h. For comparison, another 12 dogs were tested for the same actions without delay between demonstration and recall. Our test consisted of a modified version of the Do as I Do paradigm, combined with the two-action procedure to control for non-imitative processes. Imitative performance of dogs remained consistently high independent of increasing retention intervals, supporting the idea that dogs are able to retain mental representations of human actions for an extended period of time. The ability to imitate after such delays supports the use of long-term declarative memory.

Memorability of Alphanumeric and Composite Scene Authentication (CSA) Passcodes Over Extended Retention Intervals

Current authentication strategies seek to increase security by requiring users to create more secure alphanumeric passwords. Unfortunately, the inverse relationship between alphanumeric password security and memorability prevents users from being able to create a password that is both secure and memorable. Graphical user authentication mechanisms have been explored as a means to maintain security while enhancing memorability of passcodes. Current approaches often use unrelated picture sets from which participants have to remember a subset, with mixed results. The study outlined in this paper seeks to further validate the Composite Scene Authentication (CSA) graphical passcode mechanism (Johnson & Werner, 2006). Extending retention intervals and increasing the variability of stimuli clearly demonstrated the superiority of CSA over alphanumerical passwords. In addition, we manipulated the mode of presentation (serial vs. composite) to assess the memorability of stimuli presented in different temporal formats. In the current study CSA passcodes consisting of nine categorical dimensions were compared to nine character alphanumeric passwords. Participants showed a strong advantage in passcode retention of graphical passcodes for both modes of presentation. This effect grew larger with increasing retention intervals. At the longest retention interval (6 weeks), only 10 (12%) participants were able to produce their alphanumerical password vs. 50 (60%) participants who were still able to produce the correct graphical passcode.

Phonological similarity in free and serial recall: The effect of increasing retention intervals

The phonological similarity effect (or acoustic confusion effect) consists of poor serial recall performance for lists composed of similar‐sounding words compared to lists of dissimilar‐sounding items. Building on the work of Nairne and Kelley (1999), the extent to which this classical verbal short‐term memory effect changes over the course of a retention interval was investigated. The impact of the phonological similarity on memory performance over time was compared in three paradigms: order reconstruction, serial recall, and free recall. Participants were presented with two blocks of 15 lists composed of five monosyllabic words, one block containing phonologically similar words and the other phonologically distinct words. Recall occurred either after 2, 8, or 24 seconds retention interval filled with a digit shadowing task. Our results confirmed and extended those of Nairne and Kelley. In order reconstruction and serial recall tasks, a classical phonological similarity effect (i.e., decrement in perform...

The properties of retention intervals and their affect on retaining prospective memories.

Five experiments were conducted to explore how the character of the retention interval affected event-based prospective memory. According to the canons of retrospective memory, prospective performance should have been worse with increasing delays between intention formation and the time it was appropriate to complete an action. That result did not occur. Rather, prospective memory was better with increasing retention intervals in Experiments 1A, 1B, and 3. In manipulating the nature of the retention interval, the authors found that there were independent contributions of retention interval length and the number of intervening activities, with more activities leading to better prospective memory (Experiments 2 and 3). The identical retention intervals did not improve retrospective memory in Experiment 4. Theoretical explanations for these dissociations between prospective and retrospective memory are considered.

The role of trial tracking in rats’ working memory

The experiments reported in the present study tested whether decreasing intertrial intervals (ITIs) intensifies the disruptive effects of increasing retention intervals (RIs) in a delayed conditional discrimination by decreasing the animal’s trial tracking accuracy (Cohen & Armstrong, 1996; Cohen & Roberts, 1996). Rats responded on a fixed ratio (FR) 1 or fixed interval (FI) 10-sec reinforcement schedule at a second light or tone stimulus, S2, when the first light or tone stimulus, S1, had signaled an FI 10-sec or FR 1 schedule, respectively. RIs between S1 and S2 were increased from 3 to 24 sec and never exceeded ITIs that were reduced from 24 to 6 sec. For some rats, the trials were separated from each other by extending the lever at S1 and retracting it at the end of S2 (ITI lever-retracted group). For other, control rats, the lever remained extended throughout the session (lever-extended group, Experiment 1) or was extended and retracted with the onset and offset of each stimulus (RI/ITI lever-retracted group, Experiment 2). The rats under all trial conditions learned to delay leverpressing on the FI 10-sec schedule. Latency to begin leverpressing on the FI 10-sec schedule declined as RIs were increased, but this effect was attenuated in the ITI lever-retracted groups in both experiments, as would be predicted by thetrial tracking hypothesis. Decreasing ITIs from 24 to 6 sec intensified the disruptive effects of increasing RIs from 3 to 6 sec in the RI/ITI lever-retracted group (Experiment 2), as would be predicted by the trial tracking hypothesis.

Temporally extended retrograde amnesia for spatial information resulting from afterdischarges induced by electrical stimulation of the dorsal hippocampus in mice

The present study was conducted in order to examine whether reversible disruption of hippocampal activity using repeated (four times), spaced (at hourly intervals) electrical stimulation (at current levels producing afterdischarges [ADs]) of the dorsal hippocampus would produce a temporally graded retrograde amnesia for two-choice spatial discrimination problems acquired at different time intervals before treatment. Mice were trained successively on five different two-choice discrimination problems in one of two distinct elevated 8-arm radial mazes (A and B). The first two problems were acquired in Maze A, and the final three problems in Maze B. Hippocampal ADs were elicited approximately 24 h after the mice had acquired the last discrimination problem (B3). One week later, subjects were tested for retention of all five discrimination problems. Results indicated that, as compared with control groups, experimental subjects were severely impaired for retention of the three discrimination problems acquired from 10 days to 5.5 weeks earlier in Maze B, but showed no deficit for the problems acquired 7 weeks earlier in Maze A. However, for problems acquired in Maze B, no temporal gradient for amnesia was observed, although control mice exhibited significant forgetting with increasing retention intervals. Temporally extended but ungraded retrograde disrupting effect of hippocampal stimulation for discriminations acquired in Maze B is discussed.

The role of trial tracking on rats' successive delayed matching-to-sample modality performance

The present study tested a trial tracking hypothesis that rats' matching accuracy to sample modality (onset of chamber lights or a tone) in a successive delayed matching task is, in part, determined by their ability to determine whether they are within or between trials during an interstimulus interval. In this discrimination rats had to respond to an initial sample stimulus to obtain a second test stimulus, S2. Responding to S2 was reinforced only when it matched S1. The interstimulus intervals between S1 and S2, the retention interval, and between S2 and the next S1, the intertrial interval, were varied. The prediction that more accurate trial tracking would be maintained by rats that were only reinforced for correctly responding S2 (S1 Nonreinforcement group) than by rats that were reinforced for responding to each S1 as well as to its matching S2 (S1 Reinforcement group) was supported. Increasing retention intervals caused steeper declines in matching accuracy in the S1 Reinforcement group. Although matching accuracy to the tone S1 was generally but slightly reduced by decreasing intertrial intervals from 24 s to 12 s or 6 s, this effect was confined to 1-s and 5-s retention intervals only in the S1 Reinforcement group. A similar prediction based on differences in the required number of presses to each stimulus event was not supported. Also noteworthy were results showing superior matching accuracy to the light S1 than to the tone S1. While increasing retention intervals to 20 s eliminated this difference in the S1 Nonreinforcement group, increasing retention intervals to 5 s or more brought about this effect in the S1 Reinforcement group.

Spared recognition capacity in elderly and closed-head-injury subjects with clinical memory deficits.

This study describes the performance of three groups of subjects on a pictorial forced-recognition task, the Hundred Pictures Test. The aim was to determine whether subjects with memory deficits (elderly and closed-head-injured subjects) would perform as well as healthy young subjects, both on immediate and very long-term recognition. The results indicate that memory for complex meaningful pictures is spared in subjects with an otherwise impaired memory, and that despite increasing forgetting rates with increasing retention intervals (up to 27 weeks), still no differences are found between performance of these subjects and healthy young controls. It will be discussed how this result might be interpreted.

Response-independent habituation of the orienting response in the preweanling rat

The effect of pattern of stimulus presentation on habituation of the cardiac component of the orienting response to an auditory stimulus was investigated in four experiments. The duration of stimulus presentation was held constant, but some animals were given six 10-sec stimulus presentations and others were given a single 60-sec stimulus. During the first 10 sec of the auditory stimulus, heart rate (HR) decreased approximately 40 beats per minute (bpm) in both groups, but during subsequent 10-sec epochs, the changes in HR were markedly different in the two groups. For those animals given a single 60-sec stimulus, the cardiac orienting response did not habituate; that is, HR either continued to decrease or remained approximately 40 bpm below baseline. In contrast, those animals given six 10-sec stimulus presentations showed smaller decreases in HR with each successive stimulus presentation, and after approximately four presentations, no detectable change in HR was observed. Despite these dramatic differences in habituation of the cardiac component of the orienting response, neither group oriented to the auditory stimulus when it was presented again following a short retention interval. Moreover, with increasing retention intervals, both groups showed the same forgetting function (reappearance of the orienting response). The implications of these findings for theories of the orienting response as well as theories of habituation are discussed.

Nonverbal recognition and recency discrimination deficits in Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

In a study of verbal temporal ordering, patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were impaired in making judgements of the relative recency of serially-presented words but were normal in word recognition; by contrast, patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) were impaired on both verbal tasks (Sagar et al., 1985, 1988b). The present study used a nonverbal analogue of the verbal temporal ordering task to examine whether the deficit in recency discrimination of the PD patients transcended material-specific bounds or was specific to verbal material. The nonverbal task was administered to the patients with PD, patients with AD and normal control subjects studied with the verbal task. The results showed that the retention functions for the recognition of verbal and nonverbal material differed qualitatively from each other and this difference was present in all three subject groups. For verbal and nonverbal recency discrimination and verbal content recognition, performance declined with increasing retention intervals; for nonverbal content recognition, however, performance was essentially unchanging across retention intervals. As on the verbal test, recency discrimination on the nonverbal test was impaired in both patient groups. In contrast to the results with the verbal task, both groups were impaired on content recognition. The patterns of impairment, however, differed between the two patient groups in a parallel way to those of the verbal task: performance of the AD group was impaired at the longest retention intervals but not at the shortest intervals, whereas the performance of the PD group was impaired at the shortest but not at the longest intervals. This deficit in nonverbal short-term recognition memory was present even in PD patients who scored within the normal range on a quantitative test of dementia. These results show that deficits in recency discrimination and short-term memory processing in PD extend to nonverbal as well as verbal material and imply bilateral frontal lobe dysfunction in the genesis of these deficits.

Long gradient of retrograde amnesia in mice: continuity with the findings in humans.

Mice were given a single training trial and then received either sham treatment or electroconvulsive shock (ECS; four treatments at hourly intervals) at 1 of 7 times (1-70 days) after training. Retention was always tested 2 weeks after treatment. Control animals exhibited gradual forgetting with increasing retention intervals. Mice given ECS exhibited severe retrograde amnesia, which diminished as the interval between training and ECS increased from 1 to 21 days. ECS given 21-70 days after training had no effect on memory. The finding of long, temporally graded retrograde amnesia in mice establishes continuity between the results for laboratory animals and those for humans and indicates that the neural changes involved in the consolidation of memory can continue for a significant portion of the lifetime of a memory.

Short-term retention of “surprising” events following different training conditions

Terry and Wagner (1975) have suggested that short-term retention of information about an event is enhanced if the occurrence of the event is surprising. To investigate this idea, we trained two groups of pigeons in a preparatory-releaser procedure in which half the trials started with the presentation of food (the preparatory event). The preparatory food presensation was signaled by an 8-sec white keylight in the signaled, but not in the unsignaled, group. After a retention interval, varying between 2 and 32 sec, the releaser stimulus (CSR), a red keylight, was presented for 8 sec in the absence of any reinforcement. The remaining trials were initiated by the presentation of CSR, and the first peck occurring 8 sec after the onset of CSR was reinforced by food. The preparatory event controlled responding to CSR at the short retention interval, with the level of control declining systematically with increasing retention intervals. On probe test trials, the presentation of the preparatory food event was preceded by a stimulus that had previously been paired (CS+) or unpaired with food (CS−). Discriminative responding to CSr was better following CS− than following CS+ in the unsignaled, but not the signaled, group. These results suggest that the enhanced retention following surprising preparatory events reflects a generalization decrement induced by changing the signaling conditions between training and testing.

Retention of shape information under haptic or visual acquisition.

Memory for information on shape perceived haptically was compared with memory for the same shapes perceived visually, and under conditions where acquisition occurred through one system and matching through another. Significantly better matching was found for the visual groups at each of 3 retention intervals: 5, 15, and 30 sec. Accuracy of intramodal visual matching showed no decline with increasing retention intervals. Haptic memory was poorer and declined only slightly with the longer retention intervals. Data for the intermodal groups indicated that, where acquisition was accomplished visually, retention was higher. The importance of 2 sets of factors is considered, modality of acquisition and direction of intermodal matching between visual and haptic systems. Implications of these findings for some recent models of information translation across modalities are discussed.