Abstract

Two experiments are presented in this dissertation to investigate the effect a schema may have on mnemonic discrimination. We developed stimuli composed of a foreground item on a background that was either schematically congruent or incongruent. For the encoding phase of both experiments, these stimuli were presented to 98 participants, who were tasked with determining the congruency of each foreground-background pair. Next, the two experiments diverged for the retrieval phase, where participants were presented with either the same object as before (Target) or one that was similar (Lure). Forty-six participants in Experiment 1 saw stimuli with the same background as initially presented during the retrieval phase. For Experiment 2, fifty-two participants saw the foreground item presented only on a white background. Behavioral, eye tracking, and whole-brain, high-resolution fMRI data were acquired for both experiments and both phases of the task. We found memory discriminability (d-prime) scores were larger for incongruent stimuli when target-lure pairs were less similar and only when the background was present during retrieval. Critically, we found evidence of recognition in the hippocampal subregions as opposed to lure detection. These findings support the notion of a congruency benefit due to the "generate-and-recognize" model and an incongruency benefit due to increased initial attention.

Degree

PhD

College and Department

Family, Home, and Social Sciences; Psychology

Rights

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