TY - CHAP A1 - Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T. A1 - Aslan, Alp A1 - Abel, Magdalena ED - Ross, Brian H. T1 - Chapter Five - The Two Faces of Selective Memory Retrieval—Cognitive, Developmental, and Social Processes T2 - Psychology of Learning and Motivation N2 - Numerous studies from the past five decades have shown that selective retrieval of some studied items can impair recall of other items. This chapter reviews more recent work, in which it is demonstrated that selective memory retrieval has two faces and that it can both impair and improve recall of other items. In this recent work, participants' access to study context during selective retrieval was experimentally manipulated and it was examined whether such manipulation influences the effects of selective retrieval. Access to study context was manipulated using listwise directed forgetting, context-dependent forgetting and time-dependent forgetting. The results consistently showed that selective retrieval impairs recall of other memories if access to study context during retrieval is largely maintained, but that selective retrieval can improve recall if study context access is impaired. The findings are explained by a two-factor account, which claims that, in general, selective retrieval does not only trigger inhibition and blocking but also triggers context reactivation processes. The proposal is that primarily inhibition and blocking operate when study context access during selective retrieval is largely maintained, whereas primarily context reactivation processes operate when study context access is impaired. Current findings on the two faces of selective retrieval are well consistent with this theoretical view. KW - Blocking KW - Context reactivation KW - Episodic memory KW - Inhibition KW - Memory development KW - Retrieval-induced facilitation KW - Retrieval-induced forgetting KW - Social recall Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.plm.2016.11.004 SP - 167 EP - 209 PB - Academic Press CY - London, Oxford, Boston, New York, San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Aslan, Alp A1 - Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T. T1 - Adaptive memory: Young children show enhanced retention of fitness-related information JF - Cognition N2 - Evolutionary psychologists propose that human cognition evolved through natural selection to solve adaptive problems related to survival and reproduction, with its ultimate function being the enhancement of reproductive fitness. Following this proposal and the evolutionary-developmental view that ancestral selection pressures operated not only on reproductive adults, but also on pre-reproductive children, the present study examined whether young children show superior memory for information that is processed in terms of its survival value. In two experiments, we found such survival processing to enhance retention in 4- to 10-year-old children, relative to various control conditions that also required deep, meaningful processing but were not related to survival. These results suggest that, already in very young children, survival processing is a special and extraordinarily effective form of memory encoding. The results support the functional-evolutionary proposal that young children’s memory is “tuned” to process and retain fitness-related information. KW - Cognition in children KW - Evolutionary psychology KW - Adaptive memory KW - Episodic memory KW - Survival processing in children Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.001 VL - 122 IS - 1 SP - 118 EP - 122 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Aslan, Alp A1 - Zellner, Martina A1 - Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T. T1 - Working memory capacity predicts listwise directed forgetting in adults and children JF - Memory N2 - In listwise directed forgetting, participants are cued to forget previously studied material and to learn new material instead. Such cueing typically leads to forgetting of the first set of material and to memory enhancement of the second. The present study examined the role of working memory capacity in adults' and children's listwise directed forgetting. Working memory capacity was assessed with complex span tasks. In Experiment 1 working memory capacity predicted young adults' directed-forgetting performance, demonstrating a positive relationship between working memory capacity and each of the two directed-forgetting effects. In Experiment 2 we replicated the finding with a sample of first and a sample of fourth-grade children, and additionally showed that working memory capacity can account for age-related increases in directed-forgetting efficiency between the two age groups. Following the view that directed forgetting is mediated by inhibition of the first encoded list, the results support the proposal of a close link between working memory capacity and inhibitory function. KW - Episodic memory KW - Directed forgetting KW - Individual differences KW - Working memory capacity KW - Inhibition KW - Cognitive development Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211003742698 VL - 18 IS - 4 SP - 442 EP - 450 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Aslan, Alp A1 - Bäuml, Karl-Heinz T1 - The role of item similarity in part-list cueing impairment JF - The role of item similarity in part-list cueing impairment N2 - The presentation of a subset of studied items as retrieval cues can have detrimental effects on recall of the remaining (target) items. In three experiments we examined whether such part-list cueing impairment depends on the similarity between cue and target items. Item similarity was manipulated by making use of pre-experimental semantic similarities between cue and target items (Experiments 1 and 2), or was episodically induced through a similarity-encoding task, in which participants were asked to interrelate cue and target items in a meaningful way (Experiment 3). In all three experiments reliable part-list cueing impairment arose when the similarity between cues and targets was low, but no impairment was found when the similarity between cues and targets was high. Inhibitory as well as non-inhibitory explanations of the findings are discussed. KW - Episodic memory KW - Part-list cueing impairment KW - Item similarity KW - Inhibition KW - Feature suppression KW - Retrieval competition Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210902740886 VL - 17 IS - 7 SP - 697 EP - 707 ER -