Cognitive Aging
In healthy aging, older adults are less able to accurately remember events and the details of those events, an episodic memory deficit. This often, but not always (Huff & Umanath, 2018), leads older adults to make more memory errors. In contrast, general knowledge and its use either improve or remain stable over the lifespan. Here, “knowledge” refers broadly to general knowledge about the world, vocabulary, schemas, work-related skills, and practical abilities gained over a lifetime. Older adults show a tendency to rely on this knowledge to support their remembering.
We are interested in the positive, and potentially compensatory, influences of knowledge on older adults’ remembering (see Umanath & Marsh, 2014). Many open questions remain in understanding when prior knowledge can serve a protective role in older adults’ remembering. We still do not know the answers to basic questions, including: How does fluctuating access to their prior knowledge affect older adults’ use and reliance on their knowledge? While particularly relevant for older adults, fluctuating access to knowledge is also of interest in younger adults when we consider the implications of improving their accessibility to all that they have successfully stored during their educations. Understanding the nature of retrieval failures across the lifespan and developing ways to improve accessibility then becomes critical (Coane & Umanath, 2019; Umanath, Barrett, Kim, Walsh, & Coane, 2023; Umanath, Coane, Huff, Cimenian, & Chang, 2023). For pursuit of this work and related teaching activities, our project entitled “Stabilizing Accessibility of Prior Knowledge Across the Lifespan” has been funded by the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program.
Beyond theoretical questions, such research has broader implications for benefiting older adults’ everyday memory experiences. This line of work fits into our interest of more generally understanding ways in which older adults can be encouraged to use their intact capacities and abilities to compensate for other memory deficits (e.g., Umanath, Toglia, & McDaniel, 2016). The broader goal is to improve older adults’ everyday memory experiences, so that their sense of self-efficacy in memory increases, which likely has cascading benefits for broader cognition and health.
Learn more:
Understanding How Prior Knowledge Influences Memory in Older Adults
Umanath, S. & Marsh, E.J. (2014). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9, 408-426.
Event Memory
Endel Tulving distinguishes event-related memories from knowledge using a number of characteristics (Tulving, 1972, 1983), especially privileging the sense of “reliving,” or mental time travel back to an event. We are part of a push for fundamental theoretical change in our conception and probing of declarative memory (De Brigard, Umanath, & Irish, 2022), having developed a new theory (Rubin & Umanath, 2015) and working to improve the use of the popular Remember/Know paradigm (Umanath & Coane, 2020). We have begun to explore what gives rise to reliving, such as memory of an event’s spatial layout — the orientation of objects and placement of people and actions within the event (Rubin, Deffler & Umanath, 2019). Indeed, we are now examining the downstream effects of remembering a memory’s spatial layout in terms of the extent to which it influences remembering and confidence in other aspects of a memory such as the date of the memory (Deffler, Itagaki, Valdez, & Umanath, 2022). Much behavioral work remains to be done in understanding what more concrete concepts can be used to define and study memories for events. In addition, we are delving more deeply into understanding the interactions between memories for events and knowledge.
Learn more:
Event Memory: A Theory of Laboratory, Autobiographical, and Fictional Memories of Events
Rubin, D.C. & Umanath, S. (2015). Psychological Review, 122, 1-23.
Collective Memory
Collective memory refers to memories shared by a group of people that shape that group’s identity. We are interested in increasing our understanding of how groups all around the world remember (and fight) over their past. Although the study of collective memory opens up new ways of thinking about how memory in general can be distributed, shared, and even unify a large group of people, it is not only interesting from a scientific point of view. Indeed, the importance of gaining knowledge on how large groups of people form, establish, fight over, retain, and renegotiate memories about critical parts of their pasts lies in the fact that these memories are usually of high importance to group identity (Choi, Abel, Siqi-Liu, & Umanath, 2021).
These considerations stress the need for accumulating more knowledge about how groups of different people come to remember the same important historic events in strikingly different ways, but also about the conditions under which differences in collective remembering lead to conflicts between different groups of people (Abel, Umanath, Fairfield, Takahashi, Roediger, & Wertsch, 2019; Roediger, Abel, Umanath, Shaffer, Fairfield, Takahashi, & Wertsch, 2019). To find out how such shared collective remembering happens is an avenue for future research, alongside empirical work digging deeper into the mechanisms underlying collective memories (Abel, Umanath, Wertsch, & Roediger, 2018).
We are also interested in the extent to which autobiographical memory principles can be used to understand memory at this collective level and vice versa, such as collective identities, the functions of these memories, and the influence of culture (Burnell, Umanath, & Garry, 2023). For example, personal memories are shaped by the shared norms and prescriptions of one’s culture as to the order and timing of important transitional events: a cultural life script. Yet, even some commonly experienced life story events (e.g., moving to a new place, playing a sport) are left out of the cultural life script (Umanath & Berntsen, 2013). We introduced a set of theoretically derived self-report measures and examined participants’ ratings of commonly experienced important life events that encompassed a range of overlap with the cultural life script. The events in the cultural life script better embody all the measured qualities, whether or not the events have been personally experienced (Umanath & Berntsen, 2020). Interestingly, older adults rated all events more highly than younger adults, demonstrating a diffuse positivity bias. Much work remains to be done to understand the interplay between individual and collective memories.
Learn more:
Collective Memory: How Groups Remember Their Past
Abel, M., Umanath, S., Wertsch, J. V., & Roediger, H. L. III. (2018). In M. L. Meade, C. B. Harris, P. Van Bergen, J. Sutton, & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), Collaborative Remembering: Theories, Research, and Applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Misinformation
We are constantly exposed to erroneous information in the world, whether inadvertently, in pursuit of entertainment, or through sheer carelessness. Knowledge is not as stable (Coane & Umanath, 2019) and immutable as we might think or wish for it to be. These casual encounters with errors do influence our memories for correct knowledge; people often reproduce recently seen errors even when they have the correct knowledge stored in memory (Marsh & Umanath, 2014). One hope is that successfully detecting these errors can protect against acquiring them and allowing them to infiltrate our knowledge base. While detecting errors in fictional stories or feature films can reduce the effects on memory (Umanath & Marsh, 2012; Umanath, Butler, & Marsh, 2012), they do not wipe out suggestibility and the acquisition of errors. Instead, it seems that in addition to explicitly looking for errors, subsequently receiving clear feedback on what the inaccuracies were is necessary to extinguish suggestibility (using history-related films, Umanath, et al., 2012).
A clear open question here is why people so easily fail to apply their knowledge, often overlooking errors and, moreover, later reproducing erroneous information that contradicts their stored knowledge. With its educational implications (Marsh, Butler, & Umanath, 2012), we intend to continue this line of research in hopes of understanding how we can improve detection of the errors and, in turn, protect against errors and misleading information from entering the knowledge base.
Another offshoot of this work is better understanding error detection and suggestibility to misinformation as a function of its content being contradictory or additive to what is known. People are woefully suggestible to additive misinformation whereas error detection seems to reduce contradictory misinformation endorsement (Huff & Umanath, 2018; Umanath, Ries, & Huff, 2019), and we are continuing to investigate the mechanisms underlying this finding.
Learn more:
Knowledge Neglect: Failures to Notice Contradictions With Stored Knowledge
Marsh, E. J. & Umanath, S. (2014). In D.N. Rapp and J. Braasch (Eds.), Processing Inaccurate Information: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives from Cognitive Science and the Educational Sciences, pp. 161-180. Cambridge, MIT Press.