University Honors

Associative memory refers to a form of memory in which separate pieces of information arelinked together into a cohesive memory through binding processes. The long-term memoryversion of our QuadMax associative task demonstrated that memory performance decreased asthe number of items to-be-remembered together increased from two to three to four words, aswould be expected if demand on binding processes also increased with associative load.However, an alternative interpretation is that memory worsens at higher associative loads due toincreased demands on short-term associative memory processes which may exceed the amountof information that can be held in mind at once (short-term memory capacity), as there is moreinformation to hold in mind when encoding and retrieving sets of four versus two words. Thecurrent study aimed to disentangle these processes by developing a short-term associativememory variation of the QuadMax task. Thirty-five young adults studied pairs, triplets, andquadruplets of words and were immediately tested on novel, repeated, or recombined word sets.Results revealed that there was no statistically significant effect of set size on accurate memoryfor repeated sets (hits) relative to inaccurate memory for novel (recognition memory score) orrecombined (associative memory score) sets. The lack of statistical significance supports thenotion that short-term associative memory does not contribute to memory deficits found in long-term associative memory tasks, even at increased associative loads that may exceed short-termmemory capacity.