Abstract
Although we can all agree that interference induces forgetting, there is surprisingly little consensus regarding what type of interference most likely disrupts memory. We previously proposed that the similarity of interference differentially impacts the representational detail of color memory. Here, we extend this work by applying the Validated Circular Shape Space (Li et al., 2020) for the first time to a continuous retrieval task, in which we quantified both the visual similarity of distracting information as well as the representational detail of shape memory. We found that the representational detail of memory was systematically and differentially altered by the similarity of distracting information. Dissimilar distractors disrupted both fine- and coarse-grained information about the target, akin to memory erasure. In contrast, similar distractors disrupted fine-grained target information but increased reliance on coarse-grained information about the target, akin to memory blurring. Notably, these effects were consistent across two mixture models that each implemented a different scaling metric (either angular distance or perceived target similarity), as well as a parameter-free analysis that did not fit the mixture model. These findings suggest that similar distractors will help memory in cases where coarse-grained information is sufficient to identify the target. In other cases where precise fine-grained information is needed to identify the target, similar distractors will impair memory. As these effects have now been observed across both stimulus domains of shape and color, and were robust across multiple scaling metrics and methods of analyses, we suggest that these results provide a general set of principles governing how the nature of interference impacts forgetting.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Earlier versions of this work were presented at the Lake Ontario Visionary Establishment in 2016, the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science in 2017, the Vision Sciences Society in 2017 and 2018, the Toronto Area Memory Group in 2018, and the Memory Disorders Research Society in 2018. Portions of this work formed the Master’s thesis of AYL and a preprint is available at [placeholder].
Experiment 1 of the original preprint was published at: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000693. We have updated this preprint to reflect only the original Experiment 2, with an additional set of detailed analyses and new discussion.
