Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Here, we examined how repetition under midazolam, abenzodiazepine that prevents the storage of novel associations,affects cued-recall performance of paired-associates. We contrastedword pairs that were initially studied and tested repeatedly withoutany successful recall prior to the midazolam injection, with otherpairs that were studied for the first time after the injection ofmidazolam. According to our SAC (Source of ActivationConfusion) memory model, repetition leads to strengtheningexisting memory traces rather than creating multiple traces for eachrepetition. As such, it predicts that repetition under midazolamshould benefit only pairs that were originally studied prior to themidazolam injection. This prediction was confirmed. The resultssuggest that memory traces for pairs studied prior to the midazolaminjection were strengthened under midazolam. However, word pairsthat had not been studied prior to the injection were not bound inlong-term memory because midazolam prevents the formation ofnew associations.