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A computational account of item-based directed forgetting for nonwords: Incorporating orthographic representations in MINERVA 2

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Abstract

Recent research on item-method directed forgetting demonstrates that forget instructions not only decrease recognition for targets, but also decrease false recognition for foils from the same semantic categories as targets instructed to be forgotten. According to the selective rehearsal account of directed forgetting, this finding suggests that remember instructions may engage elaborative rehearsal of the category-level information of items. In contrast to this explanation, Reid and Jamieson (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 76(2), 75–86, 2022) proposed that the differential rates of false recognition may emerge at retrieval when foils from “remember” and “forget” categories are compared to traces in memory. Using MINERVA S, an instance model of memory based on MINERVA 2 that incorporates structured semantic representations, Reid and Jamieson successfully simulated lower false recognition for foils from “forget” categories without assuming rehearsal of category-level information. In this study, we extend the directed forgetting paradigm to categories consisting of orthographically related nonwords. Presumably participants would have difficulty rehearsing category-level information for these items because they would have no pre-experimental knowledge of these categories. To simulate the findings in MINERVA S, we imported structured orthographic representations rather than semantic representations. The model not only predicted differential rates of false recognition for foils from “remember” and “forget” categories, but also predicted higher rates of false recognition overall than what was observed for semantic categories. The empirical data closely matched these predictions. These data suggest that differential rates of false recognition due to remember and forget instructions emerge at retrieval when participants compare recognition probes to traces stored in memory.

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Data availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

The code for the computational model is available at https://github.com/JNickReidPsyc/Directed-forgetting-for-nonwords

Notes

  1. The code for creating the orthographic representations and for running the simulations in this study is available at https://github.com/JNickReidPsyc/Directed-forgetting-for-nonwords.

  2. For ease of presentation, the permutations are not shown here.

  3. Because SVD is influenced by all cell entries in the matrix, and because we eventually wish to extend our model to words as well, we constructed the word-by-bigram matrix using all words contained in the TASA corpus as well as the nonwords used in the experiments.

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Acknowledgements

Randall K. Jamieson received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Funding

Randall K. Jamieson received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

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Correspondence to J. Nick Reid.

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Ethics approval

Approval for this research was granted by The University of Manitoba’s REB (project reference no: HE2022-0032).

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All participants provided informed consent before starting the experiments.

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Participants provided informed consent regarding publishing their data.

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There were no conflicts of interest associated with this research.

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Open practices statement

The data and materials for the experiments reported here are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The code for the computational model is available at https://github.com/JNickReidPsyc/Directed-forgetting-for-nonwords. None of the experiments was preregistered.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Categories and exemplars for Experiment 1
Table 4 Categories and exemplars for Experiment 2

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Reid, J.N., Yang, H. & Jamieson, R.K. A computational account of item-based directed forgetting for nonwords: Incorporating orthographic representations in MINERVA 2. Mem Cogn 51, 1785–1806 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01433-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01433-3

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