Investigation of the Effect of Changing Gravitational
Acceleration Between Study and Test in Recognition Memory - Rice University
Investigation of the Effect of Changing Gravitational
Acceleration Between Study and Test in Recognition Memory
Rice University
Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated substantial effects of
similarity between the environment in which information or a task is
studied and the environment in which memory for the information or
performance of the task is tested. Over a variety of environmental
condtions, experimenters have shown that performance on a task or in a
memory test is better when the test environment approximates that of the
study environment. For example, it has been found that words studied under
water by scuba divers were roughly 50% more likely to be recalled under
water than on land. An underwater environment stimulates the
weightlessness of space, but it differs from a land environment in numerous
other ways too. The question addressed by the project is whether context
dependency in memory extends to the changes in gravitational acceleration
of the sort occurring in space travel. Subjects will hear a long list of
words. Each word will be presented twice, with varying lags between the
first and second presentations. For each word presentation, the subjects's
task will be to record whether the word is being presented for the first or
second time. They will also note the prevailing gravitational
acceleration. Subsequent analyses will determine whether, and if so to
what extent, recognition accuracy varies with the degree of match between
the gravitational accelerations prevailing at the time of the word's first
and second presentations. Findings of context dependency would have
implications for the training of astronauts.
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Last Modified: Tue May 19 1998
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