Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Psychology

Memory is an essential aspect of cognition, enabling us to retain information that can be used to guide decision-making and future planning. However, we often forget information due to proactive and retroactive interference from other, competing memories. Proactive interference occurs when new learning is more difficult as a result of previously acquired memories, whereas retroactive interference occurs when it is more difficult to remember previously acquired information as a result of new learning. Recent work has presented evidence that children are more vulnerable to interference effects than adults, experiencing dramatic levels of forgetting due to new learning. An essential question is what mechanisms modulate interference and changes in the magnitude of interference across development. This dissertation uses four experiments to examine factors modulating susceptibility to interference, including consolidation (i.e., the stabilization of memory traces across time) and memory binding (i.e., forming complex associations between multiple elements of an experience). Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effect of time delays on children's susceptibility to retroactive interference by comparing forgetting due to new learning upon immediate testing and following a 48-hr delay. The results indicated that children's retroactive interference was strong when memory was probed immediately after learning of new information, but was eliminated following a delay, suggesting a powerful role of consolidation in early memory development. Experiments 3 and 4 were designed to test whether memory binding processes might contribute to children's and adults' ability to resist interference effects. These experiments introduced a new paradigm to test interference and memory binding in 5- and 8-year-old children, as well as adults, and found evidence of decreased susceptibility to interference and improvements in memory binding across development. In addition, individual differences in (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Vladimir Sloutsky (Advisor); John Opfer (Committee Member); Per Sederberg (Committee Member) Subjects: Developmental Psychology; Psychology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2014, Psychology

Learning often affects future learning and memory for previously learned information by exerting either facilitation or interference effects. This work focuses on interference effects with the goal of better understanding memory development and mechanisms of such interference. In this study preschool-aged children and adults participated in a three-phased associative learning paradigm containing stimuli that were either unique or repeated across phases. Both age groups demonstrated interference effects, but only for repeated items. Proactive effects were comparable across age groups, whereas retroactive interference was much stronger in children. Retroactive interference increased in adults when contextual differences between phases were minimized (Experiment 2), and decreased in adults who were more successful at encoding repeated pairs of stimuli (Experiment 3). Together, these results suggest that configural encoding of stimuli may be an important mechanism of memory retention and memory development.

Committee: Vladimir Sloutsky (Advisor); John Opfer (Committee Member); Per Sederberg (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Developmental Psychology; Psychology

MA, Kent State University, 2010, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Memory for a learning episode involves a variety of features that become associated with the learning episode and that aid in retrieval. These features include not only specific cues that predict an event but also background and contextual stimuli present during the learning episode and play a role in retention of memory. This study used Pavlovian fear conditioning and manipulated exposure to various other contexts during the retention interval in an attempt to alleviate the performance decrement usually seen with a shift in context during testing. Experiment 1 had groups that received no exposure to contexts other than the training and testing context and that were tested in either the original context or a novel context 48 hours after training. There were also groups that did receive exposure to multiple contexts 24 hours after training and were tested in either the original or a novel context 48 hours after training. Experiment 1 warranted no evidence of retroactive interference of the stimulus attributes perhaps due to some procedural error. Experiment 2 had no or multiple exposure groups as well as groups that were exposed to a single context during the retention interval and were tested either in the original training context or a novel context 48 hours after training. The context shift effect was attenuated due to retroactive interference of the multiple context exposures indicating that the multiple context exposures made any stimulus attributes encountered and those in memory functionally interchangeable, resulting in a flattening of the contextual generalization gradient.

Committee: David Riccio (Advisor); John Dunlosky (Committee Member); Stephen Fountain (Committee Member); Beth Wildman (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychobiology