Cassie Widdison and Brock Kirwan, Psychology
Regions of the brain, such as the medial temporal lobe (MTL), including the hippocampus and the adjacent MTL cortex, facilitate recognition memory performance (Squire, Stark, & Clark, 2004). The hippocampus is known for its ability to encode and retrieve memories through two processes called pattern separation and pattern completion (Mcclelland, Mcnaughton, & Oreilly, 1995). Pattern separation is a computational process in which the memory representations of similar stimuli are made as dissimilar as possible. This allows one to recall differences between old stimuli and similar, but novel stimuli. Pattern completion is a computational process where a memory representation is retrieved by a degraded or partial cue. This process may result in an old stimulus being recalled but the differences between the old and similar not being registered.
Context memory refers to remembering both an item and the specific contextual information in which it was encountered. Item memory refers to knowing an item that was encountered, but not the context (Glisky, Polster, & Routhieaux, 1995). It has been proposed that associating relations between objects and objects within their contexts is at the core of declarative memory, which relies on hippocampal processing (Stark & Squire, 2001).
The majority of the time this year towards this study was used to create the stimuli. To be able to have validity in the study I set up a survey to have college students rate the similarity of the pairs of images as well as the backgrounds alone. What else took a lot of time was setting up the computer program to run the original study. Now everything is ready for the behavioral data to be collected.