Evidence map›Paper›PMID 33475397›Full record

ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2021

Semantic influences on episodic memory distortions.

Alexa Tompary, Sharon L Thompson-Schill

Open access · hybridAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
28citing papers in PubMed
4.6field-weighted citation impact, top 4% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

28 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. The Game of Self: Identity and Experience as Active Inference.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026
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  13. Distinct mechanisms and functions of episodic memory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024
    Article
  14. Article
  15. Article
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  17. Object Feature Memory Is Distorted by Category Structure.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024
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  19. Review
  20. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Alexa TomparyDepartment of Psychology.ORCID 0000-0001-7735-3849
Sharon L Thompson-SchillDepartment of Psychology.

Funding

Linguistic and NonLinguistic Functions of Frontal CortexR01DC009209 · NIDCD · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · PI THOMPSONSCHILL, SHARON L · 2008 to 2018
$5.2M
Semantic contributions to episodic memoryF32NS108511 · NINDS · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · PI TOMPARY, ALEXA · 2019 to 2020
$77k
NIDCD NIH HHS R01 DC009209NIH HHSNINDS NIH HHS F32 NS108511
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Prior knowledge has long been known to shape new episodic memories. However, it is less clear how prior knowledge can scaffold the learning of a new class of information, and how this can bias memory for the episodes that contributed to its acquisition. We aimed to quantify distortions in episodic memories resulting from the use of prior category knowledge to facilitate learning new information. Across 4 experiments, participants encoded and retrieved image-location associations. Most members of a category (e.g., birds) were located near each other, such that participants could leverage their prior category knowledge to learn the spatial locations of categories as they encoded specific image locations. Critically, some typical and atypical category members were in random locations. We decomposed location memory into 2 measures: error, a measure of episodic specificity; and bias toward other category members, a measure of the influence of newly-learned information about category locations. First, we found that location memory was more accurate for images whose locations were spatially consistent with their category membership. Second, when images were spatially inconsistent (i.e., in random locations), retrieval of typical category members was more biased toward their category's location relative to atypical ones. These effects replicated across 3 experiments, disappeared when images were not arranged by category, and were stronger than effects observed with images arranged by visual similarity rather than category membership. Our observations provide compelling evidence that memory is a reconstruction of multiple sources of prior knowledge, new learning, and memory for specific events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Indexed as

Memory, EpisodicHumansKnowledgeSemantics

Identifiers

PMID33475397
PMCPMC8800368
OpenAlexW3122390447

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceTDM
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.