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      Knowledge Is Power: Prior Knowledge Aids Memory for Both Congruent and Incongruent Events, but in Different Ways

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          Abstract

          Events that conform to our expectations, that is, are congruent with our world knowledge or schemas, are better remembered than unrelated events. Yet events that conflict with schemas can also be remembered better. We examined this apparent paradox in 4 experiments, in which schemas were established by training ordinal relationships between randomly paired objects, whereas event memory was tested for the number of objects on each trial. Better memory was found for both congruent and incongruent trials, relative to unrelated trials, producing memory performance that was a “ U-shaped” function of congruency. The congruency advantage but not incongruency advantage was mediated by postencoding processes, whereas the incongruency advantage, but not congruency advantage, emerged even if the information probed by the memory test was irrelevant to the schema. Schemas therefore augment event memory in multiple ways, depending on the match between novel and existing information.

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          Most cited references81

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          Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory.

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            Interplay of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in memory.

            Recent studies on the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex have considerably advanced our understanding of the distinct roles of these brain areas in the encoding and retrieval of memories, and of how they interact in the prolonged process by which new memories are consolidated into our permanent storehouse of knowledge. These studies have led to a new model of how the hippocampus forms and replays memories and how the prefrontal cortex engages representations of the meaningful contexts in which related memories occur, as well as how these areas interact during memory retrieval. Furthermore, they have provided new insights into how interactions between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex support the assimilation of new memories into pre-existing networks of knowledge, called schemas, and how schemas are modified in this process as the foundation of memory consolidation. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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              Schemas and memory consolidation.

              Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memory in the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process. We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occur extremely quickly if an associative "schema" into which new information is incorporated has previously been created. In experiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task for rats, the memory of flavor-place associations became persistent over time as a putative neocortical schema gradually developed. New traces, trained for only one trial, then became assimilated and rapidly hippocampal-independent. Schemas also played a causal role in the creation of lasting associative memory representations during one-trial learning. The concept of neocortical schemas may unite psychological accounts of knowledge structures with neurobiological theories of systems memory consolidation.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                J Exp Psychol Gen
                J Exp Psychol Gen
                Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
                American Psychological Association
                0096-3445
                1939-2222
                5 November 2018
                February 2019
                : 148
                : 2
                : 325-341
                Affiliations
                [1 ]MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge
                Author notes
                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
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5818-838X
                Article
                xge_148_2_325 2018-53711-001
                10.1037/xge0000498
                6390882
                30394766
                0f856b45-8afd-4492-8221-e2f8f6e32123
                © 2018 The Author(s)

                This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.

                History
                : 29 November 2017
                : 24 July 2018
                : 27 July 2018
                Categories
                Articles

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                prediction error,schema,associative memory,encoding,one-shot learning

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