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Inductive reasoning and implicit memory: evidence from intact and impaired memory systems

Inductive reasoning and implicit memory: evidence from intact and impaired memory systems. Authors: Luisa Girelli, Carlo Semenza and Margarete Delazer. Appeared in Neuropsychologia 42 (2004) Review by: Sonja Damnjanovic. Introduction.

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Inductive reasoning and implicit memory: evidence from intact and impaired memory systems

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  1. Inductive reasoning and implicit memory: evidence from intact and impaired memory systems Authors: Luisa Girelli, Carlo Semenza and Margarete Delazer. Appeared in Neuropsychologia 42 (2004) Review by: Sonja Damnjanovic

  2. Introduction • Inductive reasoning – process of inferring a general rule by inspection of specific instances • Inductive reasoning is essential in problem solving, development of expertise and learning • Typical examples of inductive reasoning tasks are ‘series completion’ problems

  3. Series completion problem • Letter or number series completion are given to participants (e.g. A C E G or 2 4 8 16) The task is to discover a general rule, which defines the relations between constituent elements. The rule has to be identified and applied to continue given series!

  4. Purpose of the study • To investigate role of implicit memory in problem solving • Previous studies show that number series completion may be facilitated by a priming procedure • Priming effects in number series completion

  5. Presented studies • Experiment 1 – • A) explores the time course of priming in number series completion. The number of intervening trials between prime and the target varied (4 and 10) • B) explores whether the trials were explicitly remembered or not • Experiment 2 – used just the lag 4 and was designed to examine which stage in number series completion is the most sensitive to priming • Case study – amnesic patient’s performance on number series completion task

  6. Experiment 1 • Number series completion task • Experimental trials were mixed with filler trials • Both experimental and filler trials varied in difficulty • Primes and targets were separated by four trials (block1) or by 10 trials (block 2). • Task: say aloud what number comes next • Recognition task • Similar to series completion design, but following different criteria • Experimental trials were either identical prime-target pairs or pseudo-pairs • Task: Answer whether the trial was presented before !

  7. Experiment 1

  8. Results - reliable priming effect! - faster and more accurate answers for target series then for primes series - Lack of significant difference between priming effects in lag4 and lag10 conditions (they are both pretty long for priming) -Difficulty of the trial influenced accuracy • Easy trials (floor effect): low error rate for primes and targets • Performance on recognition task was poor- excluding strategies of explicit recollection

  9. Experiment 2 • 1. Series completion task – identical to the Experiment1 • 2. Identification task – identify the algorithm without completing it • 3. Extrapolation task – (e.g.,”+2” for 2 4 6 8 ; participants were to say 10).

  10. Experiment 2 results

  11. Discussion Experiment 2 • Question: Whether priming can be attributed to different processing components? • Identification task – participants were faster and more accurate in identifying rules for targets in comparison to the rules for primes • Difficult tasks yielded larger priming effects • (my comment: probably easy items were too easy) • Authors comments: completion of easy and difficult series relies on different subprocedures

  12. Experiment 2 • Extrapolation task • - significant priming for difficult items only • My comment: easy items, too easy to catch the difference between primes and targets • Processing differences between easy and difficult problems

  13. Case study • Case of amnesia: PR, 55 years old • Performance on memory tests: • Average WM span, impaired autobiographical memory, severe deficits in learning verbal and visual information • Other results in the table

  14. Tasks were the same as in Experiments 1 and 2 Results: Significant priming for lag 4 series completion task (p<.0001) in both difficult and easy trials Not significant priming for lag 10

  15. Identification tasks • Significant priming for difficult (p< .01), but not for easy trials • Extrapolation task • No significant difference • Recognition task • There is no evidence that he was able to explicitly recognize previously presented trials

  16. General discussion • Studies support the view that priming occurs via implicit memory activation. Participants did not explicitly recognized previously presented trials. • PR shows the evidence that the priming doesn’t occur due to explicit processes • Long lasting priming (because of the lag 10) • But lag of 4 is also long

  17. Comments: • Experiment 1. Lag 4 and lag 10 are arbitrary and not too different • Experiment 2. Not sure that the stages are measuring what underlies priming. • Case study. Sample size of 1 might not reflect what is really going on.

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