The CML recently attended the Psychonomic Society annual meeting, where graduate students Angelique Delarazan and Ata Karagoz presented their recent research.
Angelique’s work focused on understanding the role of temporal lag in binding events into coherent memories. She asked participants to watch a short story in which a main character interacted with recurring side-characters. These side characters appeared twice in the story separated by either a short delay or a long delay, with the two appearances being either directly related to one another (coherent) or unrelated. She then tested participants’ memories for the stories and asked them to estimate how much time separated each event. Angelique found that coherence, but not delay, modulated recall ability, and that temporal distance between events was not affected by narrative coherence.
To view a full-size version of Angelique’s poster, click the thumbnail above. To watch her video presentation, click here.
To view a full-size version of Ata’s poster, click the thumbnail above.
Ata sought to understand how we construct and use mental representations of a goal-directed decision making task. Participants completed a two-step task designed to dissociate model-based from model-free control and judged the relatedness of task objects before and after completing the task. Ata used behavioral representational similarity analysis to capture participants’ mental representations of structure which allowed him to assess which item associations were most important for each individual’s cognitive map of the task. He found that the representation of abstract task structure predicted task performance and model-based control and was affected by motivation.