Colloquium: Memory and Decision Making: Low Level Features and Breakdowns in Access Control

Michael Humphreys is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. Mike graduated with a PhD from Stanford University where he worked with W. K. Estes. Mike then taught at The University of British Columbia and Northwester University before coming to The University of Queensland in 1979 as a Lecturer. Mike is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Most of his work has been in the area of episodic memory including the relationship with semantic and procedural memory. Since the mid 1980s much of this work has focussed on distributed representations and the role of memory access. Mike has also worked in the area of arousal and motivation and he has had a continuing interest in the role of memory in decision making. Currently Mike is working on the relationship between pre and post access control processes, the role of attention in memory, and the nature of forgetting. Mike’s talk will combines his interests in the control of memory access, the relationship between semantic, procedural and episodic memory, and the role of memory in decision making.

Abstract: I introduce a paradigm in which there is very good learning of individual instances but where higher order concepts are concealed. In the first series of experiments words are paired with pictures (e.g., fictitious brand names are paired with photographs of attractive and unattractive females or active and inactive words are paired with photographs of male and female faces). The experiments are designed to show that prior learning can intrude in an unbidden, but not necessarily unaware, manner in semantic and personal judgment tasks such as likability ratings and judgments of whether a word is active or inactive. I also review evidence from a variety of other tasks where these kind of intrusions are best characterized as a breakdown in access control not as a special kind of memory. The second series, pairs full paintings by Picasso and Monet and the same paintings reconstructed from the first 10 eigenvectors with male and female names. A concept is created by pairing Picasso paintings with female names and Monet paintings with male names or vice versa. This series reinforces the theme of unbidden intrusions and shows that concept like behaviour can emerge from a learning process involving “presymbolic” features. The importance for memory theories is that we need less emphasis on the differences between memories and more emphasis on how they work together. The importance for decision making is that we can escape the trap of arguing over whether learning ever occurs without awareness, focusing instead on specific testable questions about process. The importance for our views about ourselves is that we are less rational and less aware of the determinants of our behaviour than we think.