Abstract:
Memory specificity and generalization: Competing or complementary memory processes?Memory serves two important functions: we must remember individual experiences (memory specificity) and we must be able to link across these experiences to form general concepts (generalization). It is unclear, however, whether generalization and memory specificity are competing or complementary processes. One possibility is that individual memories are stored in detail and then generalized during retrieval. In this case, successful generalization relies on intact memory for the individual memories. Another possibility is that memories are linked to previous experiences during encoding, leading to some of the information of individual experiences being lost to support generalization. In this experiment, two tasks were used to study memory specificity and generalization. To investigate memory specificity, participants studied a series of colored objects. The test phase required participants to select the color of each object from a continuous color wheel, allowing us to measure how precisely they could remember the color-object pair. To measure generalization, participants studied face-scene pairings in which two faces were paired with a given scene (F1-S1, F2-S1), and one of the faces was also paired with a second scene (F2-S2). Generalization was measured by how often participants linked the second face with the second scene (F2-S2) at test given the faces’ shared preference for the first scene. To understand the relationship between memory specificity and generalization, we correlated performance on the two independent tasks. If generalization relies on intact memory for individual experiences, then I predict performance on generalization and memory specificity will be positively correlated.