Codification and retrieval of declarative memory after retroactive interference in homonymous words

• Grant number: 15/18464-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2015
• End date: October 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Cognitive Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Orlando Francisco Amodeo Bueno
• Grantee: Susanny Cristini Vercellino Tassini
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Long-Term Declarative Memory is responsible for storage and retrieval of past events and facts about the world, being divided into Episodic Memory and Semantic Memory. The Episodic Memory allows the conscious recall of specifics episodes and the Semantic Memory allows recollection of facts and is not linked with time and events. According to the theory of interference, the loss of a target information occurs because intervening information dispute its existence with the target information. When a information is presented after a target information and interferes the consolidation of the first information, this process is called Retroactive Interference. This process of interference is well-defined in relation to Episodic memory, but its not in relation to the Semantic content that may have an interfering information during the encoding and retrieval. This study aims to investigate the Retroactive Interference with sentences with congruent and incongruent context to the homonymous words - words that have two or more semantic representations, commonly activated depending on the context, but only a phonological representation - will affect the encoding and recovery of these words. An experiment with healthy subjects (N-90, 30 per group: Congruent phrases, Incongruent and Control) was designed. The participant must remember lists of words and phrases. Each group should also remember lists with semantic relations and lists without semantic relation, will be performed analysis and comparisons on the free recall and serial position in these conditions mentioned above. In this experiment will be presented after the lists phrases with congruent and incongruent contexts to the homonymous words and control phrases. The participant must remember the lists of words and phrases. We will perform Multivariate ANOVA and repeated measures, followed by post-hoc Bonferroni test, to detect differences between groups and conditions in order to answer the hypothesis.