Investigating Interference, and Context Presentation in Episodic Memory Through Behavioural and Pupillometry Studies.

Sammanfattning: This research aims to examine the effects of interference and context presentation during the retrieval of encoded information which was encoded in a dynamic context. To examine this, we conducted two experiments where there was a presentation of information where half of the overall encoded information shared a constituent with information that was encoded in another context. The remaining half of the information was encoded in only one context. We then presented half of the information with context presentation during recall and half without. We then tested participants' recall of this information and used regressions on behavioral and pupillometry results to examine under what circumstances. Behavioural results indicated that in both experiments , Results from both experiments indicated that when examining all the information, and there was no context presented, retrieval of shared constituent information was reduced compared to non-shared constituent information. This finding reversed when context was presented. When examining the final encoded information, both findings were also found in the first experiment, whilst only the finding relating to no context presentation was found in the second experiment. In both experiments when examining first encoded information none of these results were found. In the first experiment, when examining overall data, pupillometry results indicated there was increased pupil dilation when a) retrieving second half encoded information, and b) when retrieving information with no shared constituent when context was presented. When examining first encoded information only the finding relating to context presentation was found. These findings were not found when examining the final encoded information, or data form experiment 2. We discuss these results in relation to two underlying processes.