This work was supported by the United Kingdom Medical Research Council (SUAG/010/RG91365).
Some or all of the data have been presented at the following conferences and scientific
meetings in the past, either in form of an oral or poster presentation: “How Prediction
Errors and Schemas Shape our Memories” at the International Conference on Memory in
Budapest, Hungary in 2016; “Novel Events That Confirm or Violate Expectations Enhance
Associative Memory” at the Novelty, Repetition and the Brain Workshop at UEA, Norwich,
United Kingdom; and “Improved Associative Memory When Expectations Are Confirmed”
at the International Conference for Cognitive Neuroscience, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
(a preprint of the manuscript, the stimuli used in the experiment and the raw data
are available on the Open Science Framework:
https://psyarxiv.com/um4ga/).
This investigation was prompted by an apparent paradox in the literature, with some
studies suggesting that memory is enhanced for information that is congruent with
prior knowledge, but other studies suggesting memory is better for incongruent information
that violates prior knowledge. Evidence for the latter incongruency advantage included
our own work showing that better episodic memory is associated with higher prediction
error (
Greve et al., 2017), once the use of prior knowledge at test was controlled. The apparent paradox between
the effects of schema (congruency effects) and novelty (incongruency effects) in memory
was one impetus behind the SLIMM theoretical framework that we coproposed in
van Kesteren et al. (2012), which reviewed neuroscientific evidence to propose that the influence of these two
factors is supported by different brain systems. Indeed, in that review, we predicted
the current
U-shaped function of memory against congruency, and the dissociability of the two ends
of this
U-shape, even though there was no direct evidence for this within a single experiment,
until now. This work is part of a larger program aimed at better understanding the
role of schema and prediction error in memory, interactions between episodic and semantic
memory, and how these change in ageing, following focal brain lesions, and in dementia.
[*]
[*
]Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Andrea Greve, MRC Cognition
& Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 7EF,
United Kingdom
andrea.greve@
123456mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk