Differential Effects of Task-Context and Stimulus-Category Changes on Recognition Memory: A Replication and Extension of Morse et al. (2023)
Abstract
Event segmentation is the process by which ongoing experience is organized into discrete events, with event boundaries marking transitions between successive events. Although contextual changes are thought to trigger event segmentation, different types of contextual change may vary in their effectiveness and their consequences for subsequent memory. In the present study, which is a replication of Morse et al. (2023), albeit with some methodological improvements, we examined whether stimulus-category shifts and task-context shifts produce differential consequences for recognition memory and mnemonic discrimination. Across three experiments using the Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST), event boundaries were instantiated by changes in image category (Experiment 1), encoding task (Experiment 2) or both simultaneously (Experiment 3). Task-context shifts produced reliable behavioral signatures of event segmentation, reflected by an increase in post-boundary encoding response times, and also led to impaired recognition memory for items encountered immediately after a boundary. In contrast, stimulus-category shifts alone produced neither time processing costs nor memory impairments. Critically, combining stimulus-category and task-context changes did not increase recognition-memory impairment beyond those observed for task-context shifts alone. Across all experiments, participants’ ability to discriminate similar lure items from studied targets (lure discrimination) was unaffected by…
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