Schedule of Events | Symposia

Something Old, Something New: Interacting effects of novelty and similarity on autobiographical memory

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Erin Welch¹, Victoria Schelkun¹, Camille Gasser¹, Kathryn Lockwood¹, Lila Davachi^1,2; ¹Columbia University, ²Nathan Kline Institute

Novelty and schemas have been shown to support later memory retrieval through differing mechanisms. Critically, autobiographical experiences are rarely completely novel or completely congruent with prior experience, existing somewhere within this spectrum of ‘absolute' novelty to ‘absolute’ familiarity. We examined their interacting effects using daily diary data (N=41). Participants described three events that took place each day for two weeks, generating a unique title for each event. After a two-week delay, participants’ memory was tested for the diary events. Events reported as being ‘new’ were remembered with significantly greater vividness than periodic and routine events. Using a pre-trained SBERT model, an event-level relative semantic similarity (RSS) variable was created to represent how semantically similar an event is in relation to all remaining events reported by that participant. Routine events had significantly higher overall RSS values, while new events had significantly lower RSS values. Further, RSS modulated the effect of novelty on memory vividness. Routine events with low RSS were remembered with significantly greater vividness than routine events with high RSS. By contrast, an inverse relationship was found in new events, greater RSS predicting significantly greater vividness, suggesting that novelty supports memory vividness, but does so more effectively when there is a scaffold of familiarity. These results suggest that novelty and schemas can collaboratively support autobiographical memory vividness. Further, utilizing SBERT to analyze narrative data has only become a recent possibility, and has the potential to be an exciting new tool given its efficiency and flexibility.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic