The Effect Of Spatial Boundaries On The Memory Of Associative Inference And Source Memory Error

With boundaries,individuals were able to segment continuous ingoing experience into distinct event models,by which elements within the same event models were integrated and elements across boundaries were segregated and distanced.However,some higher-level cognitive functions,like associative inference entailed recombing elements from diverse event models.Three experiments in the present study were designed and conducted to explore how could spatial boundaries influence and moderate the memory of associative inference and inference-induced source memory errors.The present study adapted classic AB/BC association paradigm in which a novel AC association could be built by recombing after overlapping AB and BC associations through the shared item B.In the revised AB/BC version of the present study,a spatial boundary was manipulated during the original AB,BC encoding process.Half of the participants experienced an explicit event boundary by walking across a screen,and the other half experienced no such boundaries during the picture-encoding phase of the experiment.Experiment 1 and 2were intended to explore whether spatial boundaries would moderate the memory of cross-model associative inference.It turned out that participants under the boundary condition performed worse in the associative inference memory test because the boundary diminished the novel,indirect association constructed in BC encoding phase.Experiment 3 was intended to explore whether the spatial boundary in the encoding phase would impact source memory errors,namely the likelihood to misattribute contextual details of the episodes into false sources.The results show that the boundary decreased the rate of misattribution generated by reactivating AB associations while simultaneously encoding BC associations.And even successful associative inference,which necessitated the retrieval and recombination of elements from distinct sources,only increased the likelihood of making source memory errors for participants who had encoded the materials without boundaries.