Dissociation Of Detrimental And Beneficial Effects Of Part-List Cuing On Memory Retrieval

Providing a subset of previously studied items as a retrieval cue can both impair and improve recall of the remaining items.According to the multi-mechanisms account proposed by Lehmer and Bauml(2018b),the detrimental mechanisms operate primarily when at test the access to the study context is maintained,whereas the beneficial mechanism operates primarily when the access is impaired.However,the results of existing studies in China show that when the access is impaired,there is no facilitation mechanism.Therefore,this study combines the listwise directed forgetting paradigm with the part-list cuing effect paradigm to test the multi-mechanisms account.Study one involved five behavioral experiments.In Experiment 1,we adopted 2(instruction: remember,forget)×2(cuing: no-part-list cuing,part-list cuing)mixed factorial design.The results showed that part-list cues had no significant detrimental or beneficial effect on memory retrieval.The research design and methodology were consistent with John and Aslan's 2018 study.We found that the present material presentation time is easy to establish semantic connection.Therefore,Experiment 2 shortened the time to 3 seconds and kept the rest unchanged.The results are the same as Experiment 1.We suspected that the existence of part-list cuing effects might be influenced by the length of word list and the presentation time of words,Experiment 3 adopted a 2(recall mode: free recall,cue recall)×2(presentation time:3 seconds,4 seconds)×4(word length:4,12,20,28)mixed factorial design.The results showed that there was a part-list cuing effect at 20 and 28 in 3 seconds.In order to reduce the degree of confusion between learning words,Experiment 4 used two groups of 20 words from experiment 3,changed the experimental design to a complete between-subject design.The results showed that under the condition of remembering,there was a part-list cuing impairment effect,while under the condition of forgetting,part-list cues improved memory retrieval.To test the stability of the experimental results,Experiments 5 further simplified the experimental process,the subjects learned only one set of words.The results were the same as those of Experiment 4.The results of this study show thatIn the second study,fNIRS technique was used to study the neural mechanism of partlist cue influencing memory retrieval under the condition of directed memory.The behaviors results showed that under the condition of remembering,there was a part-list cuing impairment effect,while under the condition of forgetting,part-list cues improved memory retrieval.The fNIRS results showed under the condition of forgetting,the presence of part-list cue caused the significant activation of the frontopolar cortex compared with the absence of part-list cue.This suggests that the frontopolar cortex plays an important role in the extraction phase.The following conclusions are drawn:(1)the results of the behavior experiment show that there are boundary conditions for the detrimental effects and beneficial effects of partlist cuing.The results of this study do some supplement to the multi-mechanism hypothesis of part-list cuing effect;(2)behavioral results support the multi-mechanisms account;(3)the results of brain imaging show that the frontopolar cortex plays an important role in the extraction process.Under the forgetting condition,the presence of part-list cue caused the significant activation of the frontopolar cortex.