Abstract

Memorability, the tendency for an item to be consistently remembered across
individuals, is often treated as an intrinsic property of stimuli, reflecting fixed
characteristics of items themselves. However, models of cue-based retrieval
predict that memorability should also depend on the functional role an item
plays during retrieval. Using a large cued-recall dataset in which each word
served both as a cue and as a target, we tested this prediction directly.
Cue memorability showed substantially greater cross-participant reliability
than target memorability, indicating that the cognitive processes initiating
retrieval are more consistent across individuals than those involved in recovering
specific memory traces. To identify the sources of this dissociation, we
modeled cue and target memorability using a broad set of psycholinguistic
and semantic features. Number of senses, concreteness, and word frequency
selectively supported cue effectiveness, whereas number of incoming associates
and morphemic complexity predicted target retrievability. However,
at the level of semantic categories, cue and target memorability converged
almost perfectly, consistent with Aka et al. (2023). This result suggests that
category-level structure captures stable conceptual regularities that shape
memorability across retrieval roles. Together, these findings suggest that
memorability reflects an interaction between semantic structure and retrieval
processes, with distinct lexical and semantic properties supporting the effectiveness
of items as cues versus their retrievability as targets.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant contributions to cognitive science research. One area of application is narrative understanding. Sap et al. (2022) introduced sequentiality, an LLM-derived measure that assesses the coherence of a story based on word probability distributions. They reported that recalled stories flowed less sequentially than imagined stories. However, the robustness and generalizability of this narrative flow measure remain unverified. To assess generalizability, we apply sequentiality derived from three different LLMs to a new dataset of matched autobiographical and biographical paragraphs. Contrary to previous results, we fail to find a significant difference in narrative flow between autobiographies and biographies. Further investigation reveals biases in the original data collection process, where topic selection systematically influences sequentiality scores. Adjusting for these biases substantially reduces the originally reported effect size. A validation exercise using LLM-generated stories with "good'' and "poor'' flow further highlights the flaws in the original formulation of sequentiality. Our findings suggest that LLM-based narrative flow quantification is susceptible to methodological artifacts. Finally, we provide some suggestions for modifying the sequentiality formula to accurately capture narrative flow.

Abstract

An influential mathematical model of memory, the temporal context model (TCM), posits that we encode items and their associations with temporal context (Howard & Kahana, 2002). Temporal context is conceived of as a recency-weighted average of past experiences. Critically, the model assumes that
when an item is retrieved later, the associated temporal context is also obligatorily retrieved. Existing evidence for the idea of retrieved temporal context primarily comes from free-recall studies. However, free recall introduces some critical confounds that are difficult to resolve (Folkerts et al., 2018) and also encourages memory strategies that may mimic temporal context effects (Hintzman, 2011). Schwartz et al. (2005) showed that temporal context influences image recognition within short experimental lists. We extend this by using the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) to demonstrate that reinstating temporal context
enhances recognition accuracy even across long timescales. We demonstrate that when the relevant temporal context is successfully reinstated for a reference image, the recognition accuracy of subsequent images increases. Critically, we show
that this influence falls off with temporal distance at encoding from the reference image only when the temporal context is successfully retrieved, as predicted by TCM. Furthermore, the slope of this temporal gradient increases as a function of the strength of the influence of the retrieved temporal context. These findings extend our understanding of temporal context
effects in episodic memory by showing that temporal context is retrieved even in tasks that do not encourage linking between items as a memory strategy.

Abstract

Understanding what makes a video memorable has important applications in advertising or education technology. Towards this goal, we investigate spatio-temporal attention mechanisms underlying video memorability. Different from previous works that fuse multiple features, we adopt a simple CNN+Transformer architecture that enables analysis of spatio-temporal attention while matching state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on video memorability prediction. We compare model attention against human gaze fixations collected through a small-scale eye-tracking study where humans perform the video memory task. We uncover the following insights: (i) Quantitative saliency metrics show that our model, trained only to predict a memorability score, exhibits similar spatial attention patterns to human gaze, especially for more memorable videos. (ii) The model assigns greater importance to initial frames in a video, mimicking human attention patterns. (iii) Panoptic segmentation reveals that both (model and humans) assign a greater share of attention to things and less attention to stuff as compared to their occurrence probability.

Abstract

We re-examined whether different time scales such as week, day of week, and hour of day are independently used during memory retrieval as has been previously argued (i.e., independence of scales). To overcome the limitations of previous studies, we used experience sampling technology to obtain test stimuli that have higher ecological validity. We also used pointwise mutual information to directly calculate the degree of dependency between time scales in a formal way. Participants were provided with a smartphone and were asked to wear it around their neck for two weeks, which was equipped with an app that automatically collected time, images, GPS, audio and accelerometry. After a one-week retention interval, participants were presented with an image that was captured during their data collection phase, and were tested on their memory of when the event happened (i.e., week, day of week, and hour). We find that, in contrast to previous arguments, memories of different time scales were not retrieved independently. Moreover, through rendering recurrence plots of the images that the participants collected, we provide evidence the dependency may have originated from the repetitive events that the participants encountered in their daily life.

Abstract

The landscape of human memory and event cognition research has witnessed a transformative journey toward the use of naturalistic contexts and tasks. In this review, we track this progression from abrupt, artificial stimuli used in extensively controlled laboratory experiments to more naturalistic tasks and stimuli that present a more faithful representation of the real world. We argue that in order to improve ecological validity, naturalistic study designs must consider the complexity of the cognitive phenomenon being studied. Then, we review the current state of "naturalistic" event segmentation studies and critically assess frequently employed movie stimuli. We evaluate recently developed tools like lifelogging and other extended reality technologies to help address the challenges we identified with existing naturalistic approaches. We conclude by offering some guidelines that can be used to design ecologically valid cognitive neuroscience studies of memory and event cognition.

Abstract

The neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension of meaningful sounds are yet to be fully understood. While previous research has shown that the auditory cortex can classify auditory stimuli into distinct semantic categories, the specific contributions of the primary (A1) and the secondary auditory cortex (A2) to this process are not well understood. We used songbirds as a model species, and analyzed their neural responses as they listened to their entire vocal repertoire ((sim )10 types of vocalizations). We first demonstrate that the distances between the call types in the neural representation spaces of A1 and A2 are correlated with their respective distances in the acoustic feature space. Then, we show that while the neural activity in both A1 and A2 is equally informative of the acoustic category of the vocalizations, A2 is significantly more informative of the semantic category of those vocalizations. Additionally, we show that the semantic categories are more separated in A2. These findings suggest that as the incoming signal moves downstream within the auditory cortex, its acoustic information is preserved, whereas its semantic information is enhanced.