COMPUTATION MODEL OF FALSE RECALL
Rishabh Nigam
Advisor: Amitabh Mukherjee
2012-13
False recall has been one of the most studied field for understanding how our memory works. It refers
to having false memory of an event that didn't happen in the past. Participants when presented a list of
words comprising of strong semantic associates of the critical word, are found to recall the critical word
with a high probability, while the recall of extralist or common words is infrequently observed. The model
which we use is an associative model of memory which takes into account the associations formed during
both the retrieval and the encoding process. This model also takes into account several core finding from
the Deese-Roediger-McDermott experiment and the DRM paradigm. We have used semantic associations,
episodic associations, association with the context and build two models. The first model is the add-add
model which takes the addition of the strengths of the elements in the Short Term memory(STM) during
both retrieval and encoding, the second model multiply-multiply uses multiplication.
Keywords: False recall, semantic distances, DRM paradigm, associative memory, episodic strength, prob- abilistic model, SAM(Search for Associative Memory), fSAM, WAS(Word Association Spaces), Short Term Memory(STM), Long Term Memory(LTM).
Advisor: Amitabh Mukherjee
2012-13
ABSTRACT
False recall has been one of the most studied field for understanding how our memory works. It refers
to having false memory of an event that didn't happen in the past. Participants when presented a list of
words comprising of strong semantic associates of the critical word, are found to recall the critical word
with a high probability, while the recall of extralist or common words is infrequently observed. The model
which we use is an associative model of memory which takes into account the associations formed during
both the retrieval and the encoding process. This model also takes into account several core finding from
the Deese-Roediger-McDermott experiment and the DRM paradigm. We have used semantic associations,
episodic associations, association with the context and build two models. The first model is the add-add
model which takes the addition of the strengths of the elements in the Short Term memory(STM) during
both retrieval and encoding, the second model multiply-multiply uses multiplication.Keywords: False recall, semantic distances, DRM paradigm, associative memory, episodic strength, prob- abilistic model, SAM(Search for Associative Memory), fSAM, WAS(Word Association Spaces), Short Term Memory(STM), Long Term Memory(LTM).
LINKs
link to codeproposal report presentation poster Raw results
CONCLUSIONS
This model incorporates the context association, the episodic association and the symantic association. The
results obtained appear to correctly predict false recall as
- The curve obtained for the false recall has higher values towards the start and end of the list and low values in the middle. The recall value is found in between the higher values in the corners and the lower value in the middle. This is what has been observed in the experiments conducted in the past.
- The false recall for list 2(0.55) > list 1(0.51) > list 3(0.39) > list 4(0.27), this can also be seen as there is less semantic association in the words of list 4 as compared to other list.
- The value obtained for false recall is 0.4314 which is close to values found in experiment(0.44 by Deese and 0.55 by Roediger and McDermott)
REFERENCES
1[Daniel R. Kimball, Troy A. Smith, Michael J. Kahana] The fSAM Model of False Recall, Psychological
Review 2007 Pg 954-993 2[Henry L Roediger, Kathleen B. McDermott] Creating False Memories: Remembering Words not presented in Lists , Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning Memory and Cognition, 1995 pg 803-814
3[Steyvers M., Shiffrin, R.M., Nelson, D.L. Word Association Spaces for Predicting Semantic Similarity Effects in Episodic Memory. In A. Healy (Ed.), Experimental Cognitive Psychology and its Applications. , 2004