Presenter:  Pernille Hemmer
Presentation type:  Poster
Presentation date/time:  7/27  5:30-6:30
 
The Effect of Prior Knowledge on Memory for Events
 
Pernille Hemmer, UC Irvine
Mark Steyvers, UC Irvine
 
Size judgments are known to be influenced by existing knowledge. This provides a natural means for examining the interaction between prior knowledge and size judgments in recall memory tasks. We present results from a series of experiments that demonstrate the degree to which people use their prior knowledge to recall the size of studied objects. The results show that the participants remembered-size judgments regress towards the prior mean size of the object. We hypothesize that the reproduction of past stimuli can be decomposed into three components: prior knowledge, episodic trace, and noise in recall. Estimates for the relative contributions of these three factors are obtained through a Bayesian estimation procedure.