ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
The structure of prior knowledge enhances memory in experts by reducing interference.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Selective retrieval boosts memory regardless of prior knowledge.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Training in the Categorization of Aerial and Terrestrial Scenes Differentially Impacts Scene-Selective and Nonscene-Selective Regions in Occipitotemporal Cortex.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Tuned Cortex: Convergent Expertise-Related Structural and Functional Remodeling across the Adult Lifespan.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Water Is and Is Not HCognitive science · 2025Article
- Six-decade research bias towards fancy and familiar bird species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Function estimation: Quantifying individual differences of hand-drawn functions.Memory & cognition · 2025Article
- Article
- Remembering what we imagine: the role of event schemas in shaping how imagined autobiographical events are recalled.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Behavioral representational similarity analysis reveals how episodic learning is influenced by and reshapes semantic memory.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Neurocognitive Model of Schema-Congruent and -Incongruent Learning in Clinical Disorders: Application to Social Anxiety and Beyond.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Predictions transform memories: How expected versus unexpected events are integrated or separated in memory.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Insights into motor memory interference among experts and competent individuals.Journal of neurophysiology · 2023Article
- People who are averse to uncertainty exhibit expanded semantic representations.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Has the concept of systems consolidation outlived its usefulness? Identification and evaluation of premises underlying systems consolidation.Faculty reviews · 2022Review
- Sensory modality- and load-dependent changes across cortical working memory representations.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The influence of prior knowledge on memory is ubiquitous, making the specific mechanisms of this relationship difficult to disentangle. Here, we show that expert knowledge produces a fundamental shift in the way that interitem similarity (i.e., the perceived resemblance between items in a set) biases episodic recognition. Within a group of expert birdwatchers and matched controls, we characterized the psychological similarity space for a set of well-known local species and a set of less familiar, nonlocal species. In experts, interitem similarity was influenced most strongly by taxonomic features, whereas in controls, similarity judgments reflected bird color. In controls, perceived episodic oldness during a recognition memory task increased along with measures of global similarity between items, consistent with classic models of episodic recognition. Surprisingly, for experts, high global similarity did not drive oldness signals. Instead, for local birds memory tracked the availability of species-level name knowledge, whereas for nonlocal birds, it was mediated by the organization of generalized conceptual space. These findings demonstrate that episodic memory in experts can benefit from detailed subcategory knowledge, or, lacking that, from the overall relational structure of concepts. Expertise reshapes psychological similarity space, helping to resolve mnemonic separation challenges arising from high interitem overlap. Thus, even in the absence of knowledge about item-specific details or labels, the presence of generalized knowledge appears to support episodic recognition in domains of expertise by altering the typical relationship between psychological similarity and memory.
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