Month: November 2022

After years of work my new paper titled Shape of U: The Nonmonotonic Relationship Between Object–Location Memory and Expectedness is finally out in Psychological Science with Andrea Greve & Rik Henson (PDF, Supplementary). The idea for this work came from my desire to directly test these shiny pet examples that we use in our academic writing to provide real-world context. So I created a realistic virtual reality experiment with Unity3D, which can seen in this video. A particular example I was inspired by was the butcher-in-the-bus. In this context, a neuroscientific model called SLIMM predicts that the relationship between how…

Simple summary Studies suggest that novelty can enhance memory not only for the novel event itself but also for things that happen before/after. Despite my personal strong priors in favour of this idea, I found evidence against this. This paper is now out in QJEP. There is a lot of work in animals showing how novel experiences can tag memory as envisioned by the tag-and-capture theory. Some work including my own suggests that this is also true for humans and not only works for novelty but also reward, stress, fear, physical exercise etc. Importantly, animal work also suggests that only…