Storm Atwood and C. Brock Kirwan, Psychology

Memory is separated into two parts; one is procedural memory in which processes such as riding a bike are stored, the second is declarative memory or factual memory (Mickes, Wixted Shapiro, & Scarff, 2009, p.754). Many soon-to-be mothers report difficulty with their declarative memory and find that they are unable to recall facts or information, even things they have recently learned. Previous studies have found that pregnant women’s recall is impaired but recognition is the same as non-pregnant controls (Sharp, Brindle, Brown, & Turner, 1993, p. 209; Brett, & Baxendale, 2001, p. 345). This project will be a follow-up study to a previous unpublished project. The previous project found that when pregnant women are given a longer amount of time to respond to stimuli, they respond just as accurately as non-pregnant women. This suggests that pregnant women respond are just as accurate as non-pregnant women, they just need more time to consider their response. The current project will explore the relationship between response time and score with the hypothesis that when pregnant women have to respond more quickly to the stimulus, their score will decrease. This study will add to the current body of research on memory and pregnancy and will increase understanding of how response time affects pregnant women’s memory.

We collected data from 85 non-pregnant women and 8 pregnant women via flyers advertising the study on Brigham Young University’s campus and using SONA. The participants first completed four Qualtrics demographic surveys to control for confounding variables. The demographic surveys included questions regarding race, age, length of pregnancy (if applicable) and so on. The participants then completed a computer-based recognition task. The recognition task consisted of identifying letters in certain positions. For example, the participant might see a string of letters such as GDGDG or GDGRD. In the first instance, the participant would press [C] because letters in positions two and four were the same, in the second instance, participants would press [M] because the letters in positions two and four are different. Occasionally participants would see a letter B in one or both positions two and four. If this was the case, the participant pressed [B]. Participants had to complete 10 blocks of 36 trials, each trial lasts 1.6 seconds. Each string of letters was considered one trial. We hypothesized that because response time for each trial is so short, pregnant women will do significantly worse than non-pregnant women.

We successfully collected a sufficient amount of data from non-pregnant women. However, we are still recruiting pregnant women for the study. Before we can successfully analyze the data for this study we will continue to recruit pregnant women to increase our database of pregnant women. We believe that if we used this small of a pool of pregnant women, the data will be skewed and inaccurate. We successfully collected enough data from non-pregnant controls, but we will need to increase our recruiting of pregnant women to make the results more accurate. This project is still ongoing.

References

• Brett, M., & Baxendale, S. (2001). Motherhood and memory: A review. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 26(4), 339-362. Retrieved October 23, 2014.
• Mickes, L., Wixted, J., Shapiro, A., & Scarff, J. (2009). The effects of pregnancy on memory: Recall is worse but recognition is not. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 31(6), 754-761. Retrieved October 23, 2014.
• Sharp, K., Brindle, P., Brown, M., & Turner, G. (1993). Memory loss during pregnancy. Journal of Obsteretrics and Gynaecology Research, 100(3), 209-215.