Decision uncertainty during hypothesis testing enhances memory accuracy for incidental information
- 1Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122, USA
- 2Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
- Corresponding authors: vishnu.murty{at}temple.edu, david.v.smith{at}temple.edu
Abstract
Humans actively seek information to reduce uncertainty, providing insight on how our decisions causally affect the world. While we know that episodic memories can help support future goal-oriented behaviors, little is known about how hypothesis testing during exploration influences episodic memory. To investigate this question, we designed a hypothesis testing paradigm, in which participants figured out rules to unlock treasure chests. Using this paradigm, we characterized how hypothesis testing during exploration influenced memory for the contents of the treasure chests. We found that there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between decision uncertainty and memory, such that memory was best when decision uncertainty was moderate. An exploratory analysis also showed that surprising outcomes lead to lower memory confidence independent of accuracy. These findings support a model in which moderate decision uncertainty during hypothesis testing enhances incidental information encoding.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.053458.121.
- Received June 22, 2021.
- Accepted February 25, 2022.
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