This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Kleio Jiang to work in the laboratory of Ashleigh Maxcey in the Department of Psychology during the summer of 2022. Kleio is a senior with a major in Psychology.
Understanding forgetting is as crucial to current models of memory as understanding remembering. The induced forgetting paradigm describes a subconscious memory pathway where remembering can cause forgetting. Involuntary forgetting can be induced by recognition and/or recall tasks. Yet, a limited number of studies explore forgetting via recall tasks, even when it informs the basis of memory theories by exploring the strength-dependent competition models of interference. Despite its significance, there is no current literature that explore the interaction of forgetting induced by recognition and recall. Throughout the 10 week SRP program, Kleio worked with Dr. Maxcey in the Maxcey Memory Lab to code 8 different versions of the RIF paradigm experiment to explore the different ways of finding this interaction effect. They collected 300+ participants to identify two particular study designs that show that recognition methods support the RIF paradigm in more effective ways. The moderation of age was not researched due a limitation in the data collecting process. Furthermore, Kleio led and assisted in 3 other projects in the lab. Collaborating with Professor Umanath from Claremont Mckenna, the lab investigated the difference between ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t remember’ under the RIF paradigm. Since Professor Umanath’s research is applied to general knowledge, using the RIF paradigm (which applies semantic context) to investigate the difference gives us a new perspective that has produced many novel findings. As of the end of the summer, the lab had collected 50 participants and developed a new coding scheme to fit the application of the RIF paradigm. Kleio also assisted Becky Cutler in her RIF experiment to collect 100 participants and is coding a triplets version of Clair Hong’s RIF experiment.
In addition to receiving support through a DSI-SRP fellowship, this project was supported and facilitated by the DSI Data Science Team through their regular summer workshops and demo sessions.