Declarative Memory, Awareness, and Transitive Inference

By ChristineN . Smith, L. R. Squire. 2005

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A characteristic usually attributed to declarative memory is that what is learned is accessible to awareness. Recently, the relationship between awareness and declarative (hippocampus-dependent) memory has been questioned on the basis of findings from transitive inference tasks. In transitive inference, participants are first trained on overlapping pairs of items (e.g., A+B-, B+C-, C+D-, and D+E-, where + and - indicate correct and incorrect choices). Later, participants who choose B over D when presented with the novel pair BD are said to demonstrate transitive inference. The ability to exhibit transitive inference is thought to depend on the fact that participants have represented the stimulus elements hierarchically (i.e., A>B>C>D>E). We found that performance on five-item and six-item transitive inference tasks was closely related to awareness of the hierarchical relationship among the elements of the training pairs. Participants who were aware of the hierarchy performed near 100% correct on all tests of transitivity, but participants who were unaware of the hierarchy performed poorly (e.g., on transitive pair BD in the five-item problem; on transitive pairs BD, BE, and CE in the six-item problem). When the five-item task was administered to memory-impaired patients with damage thought to be limited to the hippocampal region, the patients were impaired at learning the training pairs. All patients were unaware of the hierarchy and, like unaware controls, performed poorly on the BD pair. The findings indicate that awareness is critical for robust performance on tests of transitive inference and support the view that awareness of what is learned is a fundamental characteristic of declarative memory.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Impaired relational organization of propositions, but intact transitive inference, in aging: Implications for understanding underlying neural integrity. (2009, unknown): “…studies with neuropsychological patients, findings from neuroimaging, and findings with healthy adults with varying standardized neuropsychological testing profiles (Frank et al., 2004; Heckers, Zalesak, Weiss, Ditman, & Titone, 2004; Moses et al., 2008; Smith & Squire, 2005; Waltz et al., 1999).”
Generalization of Reinforcement Learners with Working and Episodic Memory (2019, background): “In humans, performance on probe pairs and anchor pairs with symbolic distance of greater than one excluding anchor objects tends to correlate with awareness of the implied hierarchy (Smith and Squire, 2005).”
An investigation of learning strategy supporting transitive inference performance in humans compared to other species. (2006, background): “(2004, 2005) and Smith and Squire (2005) suggest that hile non-human animals may predominantly use represenations governed by associative learning principles to support remise pair and inference performance on the transitive infernce paradigm, humans appear to have multiple representations t their…”
The hippocampus supports both the recollection and the familiarity components of recognition memory. (2006, background): “Additional information about the etiology of the memory impairment, volumetric measurements, and neuropsychological test performance appears in previous reports (Smith and Squire, 2005; Bayley et al., 2005).”