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Investigating Fast Mapping task components: no evidence for the role of semantic referent nor semantic inference in healthy adults.
Authors:
COOPER, E., GREVE, A., HENSON, R.N.
Reference:
Frontiers in Psychology - Cognition, 10:394
Year of publication:
2019
CBU number:
8350
Abstract:
Fast mapping (FM) is an incidental learning process that is hypothesized to allow rapid,
cortical-based memory formation, independent of the normal, hippocampally dependent
episodic memory system. It is believed to underlie the rapid vocabulary learning in infants
that occurs separately from intentional memorisation strategies. Interest in adult FM
learning was stimulated by a report in which adults with amnesia following hippocampal
damage showed a normal ability to learn new object-name associations after an incidental
FM task, despite their impaired memory under a conventional intentional memorization
task. This remarkable finding has important implications for memory rehabilitation, and
has led to a number of neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies in other patients
and controls. Given this growing interest in adult FM, we conducted four behavioural
experiments with healthy adults (N = 24 young or older adults in Experiments 1–3 using
within-participant designs; N = 195 young adults in Experiment 4 using a betweenparticipant design) that attempted to dissect which component(s) of the FM task are
important for memory. Two key components of the FM task have been claimed to support
FM learning: (1) provision of a known semantic referent and (2) requirement that the new
association be inferred. Experiment 1 provided no evidence that removing the semantic
referent impaired memory performance, while Experiment 2 provided no evidence that
removing the semantic inference impaired performance. Experiment 3 was a replication
of Experiment 2 with older participants, based on the hypothesis (from studies of amnesic
individuals) that FM would be more effective following the hippocampal atrophy typical of
increasing age, but again found no evidence that semantic inference is beneficial. Given
potential concerns about contamination between tasks when each participant performed
multiple variants of the FM task, we ran a final between-participant design in which each
participant only ever did one condition. Despite 80% power and despite being able to
detect better memory following intentional memorization in the explicit encoding (EE)
control condition than in each of the FM conditions, we again found no evidence of
differences between any FM conditions. We conclude that there is no evidence that the
components hypothesized to be critical for FM are relevant to healthy adults
Project available, data files, code and stimuli available on OSF: Investigating Fast Mapping (FM) task components: no evidence for the role of semantic referent nor semantic inference in healthy adults https://osf.io/3mpnw/ DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/3MPNW
URL:
Data available, click to request